The huge career risk of having a string of no name companies on the resume rather than Google, Microsoft or Apple. I am quite certain I’d be much farther along in my career today had I taken the job at the big name 20 years ago instead of horsing around with a bunch of failing small companies.
Most of those developers "doing okay" are doing significantly worse than us SV and FAANG company engineers. I save more every year now than a good number of junior engineers take home in a year, and I'm a crappy average developer not even at FAANG with a much smaller total comp than their staff. There are a tiny, tiny number of SE jobs having more than 50% of my current salary (let alone equity and other benefits and perks) just about anywhere else that isn't also a hot tech/startup market (Austin, NY, Chicago).
The average software developer V in San Francisco makes about $190K according to salary.com.
In most other major American cities outside of New York/DC area its about $140K. If you compare the cost of living in any of those cities, it starts looking a lot worse for Silicon Valley.
Yes this is a realistic range. I’ve been given firm offers to do that type of work (AWS not Google) but the travel requirements would be too disruptive right now.
Software Emgineer V on Salary.com represents the tippy top outlier of the elite senior engineer totem pole. It’s a stretch to call that an average anything. For a more realistic median salary range, just look at the figures for plain Software Engineer.