[chris11]

I'm currently still in school, and I personally don't know anyone who is making $250k/year five years into their career. But I have seen new grad offers that make that number seem reasonable. One of my friends is a really smart developer who got several offers from places competitive with those companies. I don't think they really had much full-time work experience. The first year total comp in one of their offers was around $200k. A 25% compensation increase over five years seems reasonable to me.

Edit: It does kind of depend on how you value stock/RSUs in your compensation package. Most of the offers they got were from public companies that were well run. So I personally would not be extremely worried about the stock losing most of its value before I was able to sell.