Yes, there are if's involved. It is not certain that you will achieve senior tier at a large company in a metropolitan area. But you are also not certain to earn anything from your startup equity.

I will reiterate - you are more likely to reach $250k working at a large company than you are to earn it (in salary or lump sum) at a startup.

This has been corroborated by numerous individual's experience in this thread, including my own. I personally interact with companies that pay this on a weekly basis.

You need to quit saying "a metropolitan area" when you mean "Silicon Valley and a few places that have satellite offices for companies based in Silicon Valley," is the thing.

Show me the companies in Columbus, OH that pay that way. Or Milwaukee, WI. Or or or.

New York, Philly and DC exist. They all have tech markets that are not at all dependent on SV.

It is my experience that these figures are well on the high side for Philly though.

You're exactly right. And it comes down to simple economic truths. If mass amounts of people could "easily" make 130k out of college on a path to 250k then the hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world would give up their ~$100k jobs and go do that. But they don't. Just look at glassdoor salary averages! It's right there in black and white! The sunny salary numbers he posits are, as you said, out of reach for most.

(It should be noted that I completely agree with the article's conclusion. I've come to feel that the EV of buying a startup lottery ticket is woefully lower than pg, sama or [insert vc/angel here] assert. If you can land a solid and interesting bigco job, that's probably your best bet.)

I think a good number of people just don't know that they're underpaid. I worked 3 years at ~100k, then started interviewing and quickly moved up to the kind of numbers mentioned in the article (note: nyc, so all numbers are somewhat inflated). I also gave up some unvested equity, but there's no way it could be worth anywhere near the salary difference.

Of course most devs don't make it to senior, but even fewer devs cash out significantly from startups. I think that's the point they're trying to make.

i.e Say there are two groups of 100 engineers of equal average ability. One goes into megacorps and the others do startups. Which group will have earned more as a whole after 5 years? 10 years?

So, is hitting the startup jackpot. If a 250k job has 5% odds, and a startup jackpot has 1% odds then it's really worth thinking about.