[Jach]

Seattle area also. And I've seen increasing numbers of remote offers that are close ($170k base was the most recent I saw), you could live in a cornfield for all they care.

It's not a difference of FANG vs. non-FANG, and not even necessarily of location, it's a difference of tech company (or trying-to-act-like a tech company, "tech-like") and not. A lot of words could be spent trying to define exactly what I mean by "tech company" and certainly some non-tech-companies might have tech sub-departments that are given enough autonomy to be sufficiently "tech-like". But mostly it's just a mindset. Tech companies are full of people who understand it's the tech workers who are responsible for the lion's share of the company's success, and so they're often run by technical people too. They understand it so well that some of them had to be sued in order for salaries to rise proportional to contribution again (even if still too low) since the socially low rung of individual contributors even at tech companies often fail to see it well enough to complain, which puts the sibling comment about 2009's "reasonable salary" in another light. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...)

[hinkley]

I can tell you that a lot of older companies in Seattle have not yet caught up with that change of conditions. Plenty of places are still 20% below that, and they aren't looking for junior people.