More like a $250,000 salary + benefits. Medical coverage is hideously expensive for example. Plus retirement, dental, insurance, and taxes. Still a cushy salary for a dev, but not completely out of the realm of reason.
That's definitely a high salary except for the biggest companies in the richest parts of the richest countries.
I do thin the parent's point still stands though, my current salary is not nearly that high but you'd have to pay me a lot more than $500k for me to risk hacking an American pipeline. That's an insane amount of risk for a few years worth of salary (that I'll probably have to be very careful laundering if I don't want to raise suspicions).
That's incentive for someone living in silicon valley to not do it, but outside of the hubs most of the United States has miniscule demand for tech workers (using that term very loosely), and the majority of the world would average out to something like "30k, but the job only exists if you live in the capital".
Senior/Staff developers/architects etc at FAANGs can command as much or more. It's a routine topic of conversation on hn. Netflix specifically is known for paying much more of it as cash than the others.
For experienced seniors and principal/staff engineers, this is pretty close if not below market rate. But presumably most of these engineers are globally distributed and 500k for eastern Europe is an immense sum.
> A 500k isn't all that unusual in tech I feel like..
> Like a senior engineer at a FANG
Becoming a Senior Engineer at FAANG is very unusual, across all tech workers.
It's doable with the right amount of work, dedication, and willingness to relocate to the right locations, of course. But it's nowhere near guaranteed or common.
It's not common but all of these aspects are within your control. Luck is surely involved too, but it's not like FAANG uses random() to pick senior engineers.
If you get your foot in the door into FAANG and work very hard, you have a decent shot. If you don't want to relocate, that's your problem. There are trade off's in life. If you can't relocate, that's unfortunate.
> If you don't want to relocate, that's your problem.
It's not a problem, it's a choice.
HN some times acts like FAANG is the only acceptable goal for a software engineer, and that all other choices are somehow wrong or inferior. We really need to get past this idea that there's only, single correct decision.