It's worth noting that using a flat cost-of-living adjustment both overestimates and underestimates things.
The kind of place you'd likely rent in Plano or Addison would cost ridiculous amounts in NYC, given comparable neighborhood qualities and commutes. You can easily afford to have three, four, or more kids. In NYC, one kid is doable, two is a challenge, three is crazy. From that metric, $150k in DFW sounds awesome.
Though if your goal is retirement, maxing out your 401k in NYC is much easier. If you plan on moving to a lower cost-of-living area to retire, or are otherwise looking to hit a certain dollar-figure for some reason (paying for kids to go to college), NYC probably has the edge. That is, people usually adjust their total salaries for cost of living but ignore that annual contributions to medium-term and long-term savings generally shouldn't be adjusted.
No one is reaching any of those titles 5 years out of college though.
I'm not challenging that. There's a reason after all why I have not yet and never will move to California (well, a bunch of reasons, but most are irrelevant to this). As I said to my other respondent, I'm taking issue with the absolute numbers.
On this specific point I don't have a good opinion. I don't know much about the startup scene here because nobody is doing things I am interested in, but from what I can tell they seem to be saner than what you get in the Valley because nobody has delusions of unicornhood there. Similarly, there are plenty of bust-your-ass BigCo jobs around here. So both camps seem to pay similarity and seem to have the same scattergun of stress levels.
So Dallas doesn't count as a metropolitan area? I can almost guarantee nobody here is making that kind of money after only five years. In fact, I'm willing to bet that this kind of compensation is extremely rare outside SV, NYC, and possibly Seattle.
In fact, based on what I remember of the salary bands at my former company, it was impossible to reach $250k/year in five years, anywhere in the country.