I'd say keep polishing your resume. If you dropped out of school, look for a school with low tuition that isn't University of Phoenix but finish your degree. Stay on your toes: work your way through to graduation, get internships each September (as much as you can).
And though the retire-as-a-millionaire thing might have vanished, you'll land on your feet.
Look at Vancouver, Hongkong, Shanghai, Moscow, Tokyo, all have waaaaay lower average household income than San Francisco Bay Area, yet wil much more expensive realestate price.
The median price for a single-family home in the Bay Area is $841,560 as of Summer 2015.
Why not? What are you basing this on?
I'd love to know what the median rent across all rentals is in SF! ~70% are rent controlled. I'd guess the median rent is maybe half? Around $2000? Just a guess.
There are other games in town, but those two games were seriously inflating salaries here.
The implied growth rates in many tech stocks is unrealistically high.
The Bay Area's long-term employment prospects simply cannot support current home values or rental rates.
Once public and private equity valuations drop a lot of software development projects are going to get cut and with them the jobs of many software engineers. Engineers who keep their jobs probably won't experience pay cuts, but new hires are going to be expected to take much lower pay packages.
Why? Because the talent is going to be available at lower pay rates. So why pay more?
This is not necessarily a bad thing. There's a lot of irrationality in the tech business now and it's crowding out the rational participants. There needs to be a weeding out process. It is good that it has begun.
Remember to think long-term. Technology and the Bay Area are here to stay. Let's get the creative destruction process over with as quickly and painlessly as possible so that we can get on with making real innovations.