[mattgreenrocks]

> my impression is that management often lies to engineers saying "oh, 80k USD is a high salary"

Cost of living always anchors these discussions. You can't compare FAANG salaries in very high cost of living areas against somewhere like the midwest.

This is also a question of leverage: they're able to find developers by paying 80k, so they continue doing that. If you had something they needed but wasn't as readily available, then you could start discussing what it looked like to be paid more.