Honestly, I was looking at these thinking how under-paid they are. I contract for a company in a much lower cost of living area and I'm making more than the average Googler.

I honestly don't understand why anyone would work for someone else for peanuts.

There is a difference between a contractor with 20 years of experience and a kid straight out of college.

Dude, let's get real here. 100k + is not peanuts.

It's higher than the median household income.

There's a very real premium to working on cool stuff.

Median of which households?

Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually.

[1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.

All of those are substantive arguments. I was objecting to the use of the term "peanuts", which is derisive and dismissive -- as though this salary is not even worthy of consideration.

Only 6.5% of US workers make 100K or more, according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100K+income

It's either just colourful language, or indicates that the writer is out of touch with reality.

That didn't even occur to me, that you'd find the term problematic. I just interpreted as colorful language.

I find the denominator of the entire US[1] to be somewhat misleading, as I said. More importantly, however, I found the emphasis to be on the working for someone else, not the magnitude of the salary.

Perhaps even more importantly, the high annual salary may translate to a low hourly rate, especially with a long commute and on-call duty. For some, this may be such a substantial reduction in quality of life, that the salary is low enough to resemble a legume.

[1]Do all US workers in the above denominator include self-employed contractors?

The numbers from Glassdoor mentioned in the article are simply the mean salaries self-reported. Of course, if you actually look at Glassdoor there is quite a range to what is reported, depending on experience - so don't just compare your own salary to the mean without considering things like years of experience and location.

For example, the range of reported salaries for "Software Engineer" at Google is 70k to 133k. Titles like "Senior Software Engineer" and other variants are reported in different groups.

On the contrary, I suddenly feel very good about my salary. I'm right on-track with everyone except for Facebook, while I work in the corporate world.

Of course, I work in the energy industry, so that is probably the critical difference. This industry has cash.

Is it Manhattan? Because if not you're cost of living is probably significantly less too.

I work in Austin, where the cost of living is much lower than on the west coast, and I'd say that the base salaries look good but not great. But those bonuses are really something.

I also don't have a sense for the range of experience levels represented by these figures. That's not insignificant.

It really depends on the area. Those numbers look like they factor in cost of living for California

For me, 100K has always had the feeling of "big money". On the other hand, from a cost of living point of view, I'm guessing I have more disposable income in Toronto (and better quality of life for my tastes (except winter)), while making say 20% less.