#compensation

Remote postings advertise 6% more than onsite ones, and that premium is a composition artifact. What survives is geography, and it belongs to the employer: the same remote senior engineering role runs $57,082 apart depending on where the company is anchored, while the state itself explains almost nothing.

Research Scientist ($215K) and ML Engineer ($209K) top the senior rung. But the gap to a plain software engineer is $16K, while the gap between a mid and a staff engineer doing the same job is $65K.

We mapped advertised software-engineer pay against how much each company is actually growing or shrinking — using live job postings and workforce-flow data. Pay turns out to tell you almost nothing about where a company is headed.

A viral Levels.fyi post says the median PM out-earns the median engineer. Across the open job market, that gap is a spam artifact plus a composition effect — match them rung-for-rung and the engineer wins every level.

Federal tech jobs pay ~20% less than private — a gap that should drive workers out but doesn't. Using the new OPM workforce API, the Skillenai job index, and BLS, we price the public-sector bargain: near-zero mobility, near-total job security, and a pension that ties them together.