Not posting this to brag. I'd like to increase awareness among engineers to negotiate.
I can show you my W-2 at the end of this year.
My experience is that only outliers ever come out and talk about their compensation, leaving the audience with the impression that most everyone is either a $400k/year Googlecorn or a $40k/year code slave.
Your aim to "increase awareness" does nothing for a normal or even above average software engineer negotiating their offer at a non-outlier company. How does this help them? "I think $200K is reasonable because somebody on the Internet told me that some people at Google make $400K?" Is that really going to fly, basically anywhere?
EDIT: Another source:
God do I need to get out of the startup world and start working for one of the unicorns....