u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I have many thoughts but am super busy right now to write them up, will go beyond my 60 second normal timebox for Reddit comments.
However, I would look at this report for something more comprehensive: [https://carta.com/blog/startup-compensation-h1-2023](https://carta.com/blog/startup-compensation-h1-2023)
My number one biggest concern that **needs to be called out because it wasn't called out in the report:**
**The report is based on "date of offer" and not placement date.** So this doesn't tell us anything about placements. This isn't a criticism or comment about the numbers themselves, just the methodology.
\- These salaries could be mostly people job hunting for a year. so they were job hunting for a year AND got lower paying jobs than the people who used to job hunt for 6 months and get higher paying jobs. We don't know because it's not mentioned at all. The opportunity cost of losing a salary for a month is a ton of money!
\- This only includes people who got jobs! So say in 2022, 600 people got jobs with $125K median, and in 2023 300 people go jobs with $110K median, it's kind of irrelevant what the median is OF PEOPLE WHO GOT JOBS because there are hundreds of more people without a job entirely. Again, timeboxed so I might edit this in the future if it doesn't make sense but it's a really important point. In the extreme, if 5 people got a jobs in 2023 making $115K and 1000 got jobs in 2022 making $125K median, it's somewhat irrelevant to say "the median dropped $10K but is improving!".
\- Someone posted a few weeks ago saying that Codesmith told them 70+ people were placed in 'July 2023 and the first week or two of August\`. The data I had contradicted that but this person was adamant. Well this report says about 300 people were included in 2023 up to September, which is about 30 people a month, or 1 a day, and is similar to my data.