https://www.roberthalf.com/salary-guide/technology
SPAM
I'm not sure where you work, (New/Eng) and of I can't speak for every salary in there but if your company pays 25% less than the salaries I see for my field in there, I'd never work for your company. Especially so if your initial stance is an dismissal "us vs them" mentality which paints the prospects of these salaries as "garbage" only punted by RHT. If it's somehow only true because you are in a location where salaries are much, much less or because you only hire freshly minted graduates then so be it, but remember, as a company, you get the quality of engineers you pay for.
I agree with you. One question is how would you know what others are paid in your field. I see the salaries posted in Blind. Apart from that, is there any other way ?
There are many ways but unless you have visibility into the payroll or people show you their pay slips you will never know for sure. Because of selection bias you can't really read too much into the pay discussions on Blind and people also interpret their salaries differently. Not to mention people just clearly pretending to earn more than they do. Possible sources you can look to include Blind, Glassdoor, Salary surveys, Labour Condition Applications (for H1B application processes), job boards, census reports, GDP reports heck you could look up company financial records and do some math sometimes. Information is free if you can figure out what it all means in the greater scheme of things.
It says $125k starting salary (lowest end) for software engineers in SF. That's not an average new grad salary. Would be a lot more helpful if they allowed filtering by experience
The most accurate I've seen is Hireds state of salary report
Link?
We (corp IT hiring managers) are always fed this garbage as a way to market RHT recruiters. Of course they get paid as a percentage of comp we offer so they're naturally incentivized to show sky-high salaries for every role. It's difficult to calibrate as every company values tech workers differently (IT managers and IC's being among the highest paid where I worked at the time). I checked the guide against our comp once and we were something like 25% lower. Conveniently their quote was 22% of first year salary. I chucked it in the trash and never consulted it again.