Have an upvote.

> So right off the bat I'm not sure the point you're making.

That 350k yearly salary is a high number. Attainable, sure, but high, and not representative of typical SWE jobs for most people, senior-level included. Not that people cannot or don't make that, but that it's probably not the norm.

> If the upper limit you are willing to pay does not exceed the 90th percentile TC, by definition you are not offering "very aggressive" pay.

What qualifies as "very aggressive"? 99th? How is this determined? What, typically, is a business's approach towards determining salary ranges for positions?

FAANGs perhaps don't have to observe that approach, I suppose, given their resourcing and scale, but in my experience it's done by market comps.

> Second your numbers there aren't conditioning on seniority,

Fair enough: it does have an impact on the percentiles. I can't easily get them from Levels thanks to the relatively coarse granularity, but a couple quick observations:

In the Bay Area, the top 100 salaries for 5-10 YOE ("senior engineer" per Levels) have substantially higher rates of total comp: $710k-2+M (n=1 here). Most of this is not base salary (which topped out short of $400k) but stock and bonus.

Top 100 in NYC are similar, though smaller proportionately (tops out at 1.5M TC, N=1).

Top 100 in NoVA/DC is markedly lower (tops out at $500k TC).

> and additionally given not only population size but proportion of tech jobs available the Bay area and NYC account for the majority of software jobs out there.

With respect to where SW Eng jobs are located, that's a great question. I'm not sure how to quantify this very well, but for grins, I tried searching for senior-level positions on Indeed and LinkedIn.

Indeed found ~33k jobs, of which ~12k are represented in the locations on which I could filter. Of those 12k, 6021 were on the coasts (I counted anything in Washington, California, NoVA, NYC as coastal jobs but excluded lower-cost areas like Atlanta); I realize not all of these are in SV proper, but I think it probably captures the idea of high-cost/high-value markets for SWEs, and it makes the numbers more favorable against my point above. 3087 were listed as remote.

It's not well controlled, but Indeed's numbers suggest about 20% are in SV or SV-lite areas, and about 10% remote.

LinkedIn's job filters are maybe a bit more sophisticated? but don't offer the same sort of numerical granularity. I picked senior+ SW titles in the US (so included Lead, Principal), of which 43k+ hits were returned. The top ten markets they offer for search (Seattle, Austin, Boston, Atlanta, Charlotte, NYC, San Fran, Chicago, Sunnyvale, and LA) account for 11k results, about 25%. Excluding low-cost areas (Charlotte and Atlanta) returns 9K results, also about 20%.

So I don't feel terribly uncomfortable positing that of widely-advertised jobs, the high-value markets might account for 20-25% of the SWE job market. This is not a vast majority. The numbers could be off, of course--these aren't scientific samples, the searches will naturally have an impact on results, etc. But I don't think most people in software are working in SV, and I don't think most seniors routinely sniff a $350k salary.

Doesn't mean that the OP (GP? GGP?) is paying aggressively or that advertising salary or total comp is a bad idea--just that my initial reaction that $350 is a lot--seems like a reasonable take.