[S4M]

You have to bear in mind that the dollars productivity of a programmer (how much money that programmer brings) doesn't only depend of his/her skills, but also of the company he's working. A programmer can bring tens of millions a year if he works in HFT in a hedge fund, much less otherwise. Companies in the Bay area have access to more funding, and are (I assume) willing to pay good programmers the high salaries you mention to be able to bring quicker their products to market. A standard company isn't in that situation and paying 400k for a top programmer, as good as he may be, isn't probably just worth it (at least if that programmer is an individual contributor).

[p4wnc6]

I have not found this to be true at all. The highest wage I've ever earned was from a rank and file big box corporate firm doing incredibly boring parochial line of business work as an intermediate developer smack in the middle of the engineering hierarchy.

I've worked in quant finance before too and the trouble there is that pay is more political. Firm sizes are smaller and the people with political power extract a bunch of rent, then leave a comparatively tiny bonus pool for all of the low level workers. It takes years of soul crushing political games to get up into that stratosphere of much higher bonuses. On the bottom, the firms will also hassle you hard during negotiations to try to ratchet down your base wage too, and make lots of unverifiable promises about how compensation will be made up out of bonuses. Whether this turns out true or not is largely a function of whose political darling you are. Ironically, as boring as the work is, this happens far less in rank and file companies.

I think there are so many confounding variables that it's not useful to draw sweeping conclusions about this. Sometimes big box corporate type companies will pay huge wages for someone who just maintains something that is not a revenue powerhouse at all. Sometimes firms will restructure to have fancy new divisions that "are like a start-up inside of an established company" (ugh) and they'll hammer down on only hiring young, inexperienced workers on cheap wages in a shiny new urban office who will work a ton of hours. It varies basically as much as the hyper local political circumstances of the teams vary.