These are average salaries, so the head brass pulling in million dollar salaries will skew the numbers higher than the normal employee pulling in $60k will skew the numbers down.
Right. The more telling number to use here would probably be a median salary.
Overall average salary is a pretty meaningless metric.
Median base salary for software engineers right out of school would be far more useful.
Sadly those salaries shown are 2X to 4X salaries in the DC area.