Again: I'm only vouching for the ladder, not the numbers. We (a) didn't lose a lot of people to salary negotiation (I think, in the last 2 years I was there, we lost 2) and (b) as a rule didn't want people to take pay cuts.

Matasano didn't have an "associate" rung on its ladder. We talked for 10 years about having a "junior consultant" role, but never did. So you can discard those numbers entirely.

I could obviously be much more specific about how the numbers in the rest of the ladder don't square with that comment, but I'm not going to.