My queries for LA we're also low. My guess is they base it off the salary information they've collected from their own job listings rather than a more general statistical survey of the job market.

The information is based on the Stack Overflow developer survey.

Maybe inaccurate for the Bay Area in general.

It said $146k or so was 75th percentile in the South Bay for 5 years of experience, but I am at the second to lowest level of software engineer at my company (which is one of the biggest tech employers in the area) and my base is $160k.

You're at a big tech company. The salaries at FB, Google, LinkedIn, Apple, etc. all tend to be much bigger than at non-big-tech.

That was the same base salary I had at a startup just prior too.

You are one datapoint. Again, take that survey with a grain of salt. Like someone mentioned above, if you want real data just go look at bls.gov or get a rough idea at h1bdata.info and search by city

h1b doesn't include equity which is almost half of most people's compensation in the big companies.

hence why I said rough idea.

I think it's "accurate enough".

How much closer can you expect? The purpose of these calculators is to let folks know whether or not they're in the "right ballpark" when considering salary for job offers. $14K less than your salary is still very much the right ballpark for your job.

That's the point, I dont think, in my search example, a full stack developer with an MS and 5 years experience is going to be making ~90-127k 25th-75th percentile. Sounds like he'd be getting ripped off.

Well, it's a starting point. When coming up with a salary range for themselves, candidates have more homework to do than to simply punch a few numbers into a calculator.

Any expectations of accuracy better than 10-15% are unrealistic.

In many markets 100K+ is quite nice for an MS-degree'd 20-something with a few years of experience.

But the point here is that it's not an average over many markets, it's for each market and how off it is for each market. This is why in my post I said it's off for SF. It might be true for other regions but it's definitely far off for SF.

It seems like they're (wisely) not including anything but base slaary in this?

I definitely know young devs at Uber who were in the 90-110 range on base salary and then a ton of stock. It's the height of stupid but they're young so...

The results outside of major tech areas seem to be overly optimistic, as if it is using the overall US average for those. That makes sense given the label, but they really should be providing "US, Other" that excludes all the higher income areas that they have specific selections for.

Yeah, way off in the Bay area. It seems like the entire distribution is skewed substantially low.

I think Hired salary calculator is more accurate for SF https://hired.com/salary-calculator