When talking about saving, if you're working somewhere established, you also need to take into account bonuses and RSUs or whatever longer-term retention plans are in place. The size of these boggled my mind coming from the middle of the country as much as the base salary numbers. You should never plan on living off of them, but if you can toss 15k or more (and I've seen much more than that) into your savings just from non-base-salary comp, you're pretty nicely ahead of the game.

Whether or not the established places will toss so much money around if the hiring competition from startups dries up if there's a crunch there, well, that's probably a legitimate question, but I'm not sure that job losses of that size would only hit the Bay Area.

Yes it's expensive, but also yes there really are quite a lot of jobs that pay more than well enough to make up for it.