[mmt]

Median of which households?

Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually.

[1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.

[JabavuAdams]

All of those are substantive arguments. I was objecting to the use of the term "peanuts", which is derisive and dismissive -- as though this salary is not even worthy of consideration.

Only 6.5% of US workers make 100K or more, according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100K+income

It's either just colourful language, or indicates that the writer is out of touch with reality.

[mmt]

That didn't even occur to me, that you'd find the term problematic. I just interpreted as colorful language.

I find the denominator of the entire US[1] to be somewhat misleading, as I said. More importantly, however, I found the emphasis to be on the working for someone else, not the magnitude of the salary.

Perhaps even more importantly, the high annual salary may translate to a low hourly rate, especially with a long commute and on-call duty. For some, this may be such a substantial reduction in quality of life, that the salary is low enough to resemble a legume.

[1]Do all US workers in the above denominator include self-employed contractors?