[stale2002]

No, programmers get paid 6 figure salaries to work at top tech companies in the bay area.

Also,the "computer science" stuff that is asked in Google-style interviews is vastly overstated in terms of difficulty.

The interview stuff can be learned by most any programmer, in a couple months of intensive self study, involving going through practice problems in Cracking the Code Interview. You don't have to be a genius to do that. It is mostly just repetition and pattern matching.

I went through Google's process recently, and every single algorithm question that I was asked, was a problem that I had studied/seen in advance, word for word.

It turns out that there are only a pool of a couple hundred (thats a high estimate actually) algorithms questions that most interviewers will ask you, and if you've studied all X hundred of them, then you are good to go. No PHD or CS degree required.