[sxp]

https://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/ covers this to some extent. There is a pretty wide distribution to SWE salaries. SWEs who really want those 10x salaries can aggressively pursue high salaries and get 10x the median SWE salary if they hit T7-9 at a FAANG: https://www.levels.fyi/

> For example, one of the top MLB pitchers, Stephen Strasburg, received $38M in 2019, while the average salary in MLB was $4.3M.

This isn't the right comparison. If Strasburg is the number #1 baseball player in the world, it makes sense for him to max 10x the median MLB player who would be the ~500th best baseball player in the world. I'm sure the #1 best paid programmer in the world easily makes 10x - 1,000,000x the median programmer when you account startup equity.

And people who aggressively jump between FAANGs at high levels can get $1M+ offers and counteroffers.

[knowtheworld]

Around 5% of MLB players can get $20M a year, which is around 5x to the average. But I am not sure there are 5% of engineers at the Bay Area can more than $1M