[comp_throw7]

Putting aside the question of whether there's an objective standard for whether someone is underpaid - it is not true that nobody in the UK makes $150k/yr as an IC SWE without being a contractor. Filter on the UK: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer

You'll see that mid-level (L4/E4) engineers at Google & Facebook easily break 150k; senior engineers (L5) start at ~225k and hit 300k. That's about 30-40% less than what Google & Facebook pay engineers in SV.

I also saw multiple other companies where engineers with less than a decade of experience were approaching or breaking 150k - Transferwise, Improbable, Palantir, Morgan Stanley, Booking.com, Cloudflare, Bloomberg, Yelp, Babylon Health, Goldman Sachs, Stripe, etc.