[wayoutthere]

> I think more than 10% of SWE with experience in the US are making that much or more when you account for compensation that is not pure salary.

I live in a big US city. We have one large tech employer which pays engineers ~125-150k (they max out at 200k for principals in specialized areas). At almost every other company in town, the going salary for a developer is 80-100k.

The latter type of job is far more representative of engineering jobs in the country. We told everyone "go do STEM and make bank at Google!" Meanwhile there aren't enough of those top-end jobs to go around, and a lot of folks who didn't go to a name-brand university or have friends in the right places work for (comparatively) little money.