The ">$200K/yr engineer" is also a ridiculous trope. I'm sure there are a handful of outlier engineers at top companies making that, but the median base Software Engineer salary in the Bay Area is anywhere from $100k to $105k depending on your source (+ maybe a few K in equity depending on the company).

If as a mid career engineer you can only make 105k in SV, then leave the valley and go to the Midwest. Random senior engineers make more than that in KC, with cheap cost of living. Top senior engineers make a lot more.

Almost any publicly available source is heavily skewed downwards. Also, total compensation is much more important than base salary.

I am a fairly mediocre engineer. I have less than a decade of experience and have never worked at a "top" company. Yet I earned over $200k last year.

I don't agree with this. People making good money would be most often the ones to boast about it. You sound like my hiring manager regarding total compensation. Base salary is everything, and I can prove this when I lost 20% of my "total compensation" in no bonus this year for the first time ever.

You can downplay your expertise, but from reading the About of morgante.net you have plenty of accolades, programming contributions, winning the 2013 ArabNet developer tournament and receiving awards from MIT, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, starting various companies, and even an investment fund. You are very much in a top minority percentage making $200,000 a year with under ten years experience.

Congrats! That's awesome, and I'm really happy for you. You're a far outlier.

$110k is an opening offer to a new grad these days. A few years in, you'd be at least $140-$150k. These are not outlier rockstars; they are standard pay bands at big tech companies. (And to be clear I'm talking salary, stock would be a few tens of thousands on top of that).

I'm not sure how attainable $200k is, but $105k for a mid-career adult is quite low. Perhaps that is the case at actual startups, definitely not the big ones or unicorns.

Unfortunately the publicly-available reports that exist on Bay Area Software Engineer salaries disagree with you. I don't claim to be an expert on this--just someone who can search Google.

$111,885 average [1]

$110,554 average [2]

$103,000 average [3]

I know this is HN, where everyone makes $150K and has $1M in savings and a supermodel girlfriend, but in the real world I think things are a little different.

1: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-facebook-dont-pay-the-...

2: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...

3: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/Sa...

The big tech companies are VERY standardized in their compensation for new grads. I guarantee you that at the one I know in the most detail, the base salary for a new grad is a bit over $100k. Add bonus and stock, and it's pretty easy to get to around 150k within a year or two. Not base, but total cash compensation. This is certainly not AVERAGE, but those companies hire thousands of engineers, so it's not exactly "unicorn" status either. This is not an estimate, or extrapolated from a couple of data points - this is actual knowledge of the compensation structure I'm speaking from.