Yeah I make 100k and live in Los Angeles sometimes I can't eat food I work remote so my coworkers outside cifornia don't have it too bad. But despite 30 years of experience I'm hardly worth enough to this society to let me eat food or have a roof over my head. 100k is about average for LA but at one point I had a job that paid me only 45k with no benefits demanding I generate a sentiment analysis system I literally had to stop eating to make my rent on that low pay. But in LA engineers are treated like worse than dogs, we have no social currency and if you work for an LA company they expect 140 hours for 40 hours pay far below market average.

You should be able to get more but it would probably require moving to Riot, Snap or Google. You would want multiple offers etc... I would go the personal network approach if possible with 30 years experience.

When I read comments like yours I wonder why don't you people move of of LA. I'm not in the US so maybe I'm missing something.

Vote with your feet. You're worth more, relatively, than that.

Counterpoint: I'm a data scientist in the Midwest with a non-CS bachelor's degree, earning $125k base.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Research Scientist in AI and Data Scientist are completely different jobs.

Not always.

Do bonuses make that much of a difference in data science?

My post was base. My observation is existence and size of bonus depends critically on industry.

That's pretty consistent with what I've been told, for me (PhD, East coast, with essentially no experience): ~120k