If you want to know what companies offer as base salaries check this website I made that uses H1B wage data. The tech companies have a very wide range for negotiation at each level and it's important to know that when you go into salary negotiations. Although this is H1B data, for top companies these are the same base salaries that US residents are also making, and they are pretty damn high....Look at google for example: http://salarytalk.org/search#%7B%22qcompanyName%22%3A%22goog...
Looking through the pages for "software engineer" I see mostly in the range of $90k - $135k with a few outliers. This is pretty reasonable for a big software company in my experience. There are some that are $200k or more, but these are probably very specialized roles.
Even searching through all companies there are some down lower around $70k, but most of these are companies I've never heard of, in locations that are likely cheaper than New York, SF bay area, etc where Google has offices.
Thanks for the observation. Yes, averaging over all companies will give you those results. Remember that is a comprehensive list over all companies in the USA. If you're targeting companies like Google, sort by descending order in wage, and then scroll through the first 50 records, about 40 of those are software engineers with salaries way above 200K. I think that's phenomenal.
I'm really curious, for the technical salaries that are 500k+, does anyone know what is going on? There basically appear to be a bunch of random system analyst, database administrator and similar positions pulling down 600k in the most random places around the country.
