I think in the UK it would be much easier. Outside of London, only businesses who have just done IPO will pay anything above the approx £40-80K for developers. Even Development Managers outside London are probably lucky to get more than £100K

On the other hand, we get healthcare paid for out of our taxes and accomodation is not too bad in most places so I guess it all works out in the end!

Also, businesses like Google and MS are poor calibrators anyway since they have massive profits compared to 99% of other businesses in the world and ironically, despite their crazy salaries, I don't think either are the best model of amazing software (has anyone used Outlook or GMail recently!?).

And filtering based on location, which affects the salary as well.

I assume you mean for visualizations. I do want to add though that you can already filter the comp data by location using the search bar or clicking the filter button to the right of it. Ex. https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...