I'm curious why the OP thinks the first five entries on the list are "obviously faulty entries". They do seem like a lot of money, but I am sure there can be edge cases, after all, the sample size for each of them is really small. The titles do seem rather general, but perhaps they are top positions?
I created the lists in the OP and to determine whether an average salary value is legit I looked at the individual entries. For those I declared invalid there was something like four entries making $55000 and one entry making $550000, the latter one being an obvious typo in the database.
Don't know about the other but there's no way that an assistant professor is paid anywhere near 0.5M/year. Probably they get that amount over the 6-7 years that their contract last (before tenure).
For the record, I am the OP, but this isn't my blog. I previously linked to the databases on HN, and just saw now that the owner of this blog did some analysis on it.
But I do agree that there seemed to be some faulty entries. This was the case for all of the previous years I looked at.
I was just approved for an H1B for next October, and received a bit more 25% raise after the immigration lawyers had already finished all the paperwork. I highly doubt they refactored it. It's likely that some of these are just estimates, and do not include bonus figures either.
