The problem with all salary sites (Payscale.com, Salary.com, Glassdoor.com) is the reliability of the data that they're pulling from. They all make such gross exaggerations and generalizations of salaries across locales, industries and titles that I'm sure you could reduce an entry-level statistician to tears.
Given that this site is based on "open sources of information publicly available to anyone on the internet," I think it is just a rehashing of the same, polluted information that's plagued salary discussions for a decade. I had initially hoped that, coming from a Googler, there'd be some new intelligence brought to organizing and interpreting the data. No such luck.
The salary listed for my position at my company is 27k less than I make. I'm not sure if these numbers accurately reflect the true average salary of all employees. I find it very hard to believe that my salary is that much higher than average.
Im not from the USA, so I wonder what "Twitter paying $120K on average" actually means. After Taxes etc, how much of what the company pays will end up in the employees pocket to actually buy sutff?
Possibly true, though for the same position it will be the same pay. Having managed H1B employees, every year I was required to fill out a bunch of paperwork confirming that I was not underpaying them for their work relative to their peers. We were fairly rigorous about this.
That said, you're only on an H1B visa until you get your green card. By which point, you've gone through several promotions and are finally leaving the junior engineer position. I would also expect H1B numbers to be skewed lower for this reason.
If people really want to know what the salaries are at other companies, they should just make friends with their generalist. Big company HR orgs pay third parties to do more stastically rigorous surveys of salaries by position and use that to determine how "not to overpay."
My relatives went through the H1B process. I know exactly how employers treat them. They understand that you're tied to them, and even though you could transfer, it resets your greencard process.
My father was making less money than the people under him, even though he was the chief engineer (vs regular engineers).
Given that this site is based on "open sources of information publicly available to anyone on the internet," I think it is just a rehashing of the same, polluted information that's plagued salary discussions for a decade. I had initially hoped that, coming from a Googler, there'd be some new intelligence brought to organizing and interpreting the data. No such luck.
The best source of accurate salary discussions still comes from sites like http://salaryshare.me/ (previously discussed on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2441888)