$200k/year is a great salary, and anyone who has it should be proud. But it's not exactly "gold rush" money. You won't be "rich", nor will you be able to retire at 40.

It is entirely possibly to retire at 40 earning $200k (~ $139k net). If you spend $60k a year (I live in Sunnyvale and spend $30k a year) then you have a savings rate of a bit over 55%. A 55% savings rate has an expected time to financial independence of 14.5 years.

You could easily be a multimillionaire by 40 with those numbers. If you spent as much as me it would take about 6 years.

I don't disagree with your numbers, many people live on $30k/year by necessity. But if you do so by choice, you'll have to give up quite a bit. You won't be able to engage in much of the social activities that others enjoy in your 20s and 30s. And while it's possible (even easy) to live on $30k/yr in your early 20s, as you get towards your 30s, you'll start feeling quite a bit of social pressure from your peers to conform to a more expensive lifestyle.

So if you're willing to buck society and sacrifice some of the best years of your life, just to sit on a million dollars at the age of 40, then go ahead. But if you are willing to buck society and sacrifice so many luxuries, why do you care about money at all?

I said "well over 200k", not 200k, as a few of the other comments used it as a data point.

This, 200k+ is easy to get to in the Bay Area.

No, it is not "easy" to get that. Most Bay Area jobs are not senior engineers at Google. Like I said before, a mid-level salary in SF is somewhere around $130k. The numbers are well-documented.

If you win the stock lottery, or stay in the industry for a while and become one of the top 10% of earners, you can do upwards of $200k. But that excludes the bottom 90% of jobs, which is what most people actually have.

As a PSA to all junior engineers: if you actually believe you can "easily" earn over $200k in the bay area, I strongly encourage you to take some phone screens before acting on your notions. Tell companies your salary expectations in advance.

I agree with you and don't believe the high salaries reported here. The best reference set is the H1B salary data which trends with the glassdoor self reported data.

https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm

The folks making closest to 200k or higher are largely Computer and Information Systems Managers in Santa Clara county at levels 3 and 4. I imagine these are Senior Directors or VPs.

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?code=11-30...

Look through these:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/search?q=salary+s...

H1B data doesn't include stock or bonuses.

The argument is that the expected value of salary + rsu/stock/options is effectively just salary. These reddit posts basically agree with H1B data. Salaries are the bar. A H1B has to be paid more than the prevailing wage for the position and the company has to have documented that they could not find a qualified American for that role. Prevailing wages are set as a function of the H1B + American workers so over time salaries rise.

But that's not the case, since salaries are significantly less variable than stock comp.

For high paying jobs, salary is 50-80% of total comp. For lower paying ones, it's 95+%, which is what the salary surveys show.

So comparing salary only, you strongly bias against top paying positions since salaries make up a smaller portion of the compensation for those positions.