No you won't.
Get a job at Google or your choice of big tech company. Work there 5-10 years, doing a regular amount of nonexceptional work.
There. You are making 400k TC, and should have saved enough for a down payment on a single family home.
If you want some numbers with actual sources, the median software engineer salary for a software engineer in the bay area is around $110-125K, according to Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2]. You can argue about their methodology, but it's better than the usual "anecdote = average" logic that these HN salary experts employ. Even if equity added an additional 100% of salary (which I have never seen in my life) we're not even close to these oft-quoted $400K figures.
To you guys outside of SF. When you hear people throwing around these anonymously sourced salary figures you need to take them with an enormous grain of salt. These figures are fantasy land.
1: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/san-francisco-software-en...
2: https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S...
If there's someone reading this who's interested in working at Google or Facebook but worry the compensation might be too low to live a good lifestyle in the Bay Area, ask actual people who work there for input instead of people who gawk in disbelief at these salaries.
For the conversion to be wrong, you first need to show that your personal situation is far from the norm. For example, you could show that you are saving 80% of your income toward retirement, or that you insist on having a violinist play during a private at-home dinner every night.
So... are you that weird?
If you aren't so weird, then the cost-of-living calculation is correct.
It might not be true that SV is the place to go if you want the absolute most pocket money (or, again, money-to-send-home-to-your-family-in-another-country), but I'm pretty certain it is if you're willing to live out of your car.
The actual calculation of where you should live to get the most pocket money is probably available at any Effective Altruist forum. "Earning to give" and all that.
But, I think, for a lot of people, a lot of their spending is nonlocal (e.g. internet shopping) or at least on price-standardized goods, and so is not tied to cost-of-living.
Let's say that in SV, you'd be making 400k, and—after spending on cost-of-living—keeping 10% as "pocket money." Well, that's 40k.
Now let's say that in Austin, you'd be making 100k, and keeping 30% as pocket money. That's 30k.
40k buys more iPhones (or whatever else you might want) than 30k. 40k is also more money to send back home to your family in India or wherever, than 30k is. It's smaller in relative terms, but what does that matter when it's still larger in absolute terms?
(Certainly, there's a lifestyle where spending on priced-to-cost-of-living goods can expand to consume all available salary. For example, if your goal in life is to throw extravagant parties with delicious food, then that food is going to cost less in Austin, so–even with 10k less in the budget—you can afford to throw more parties, and invite more people. But I feel like HN types are the least likely to have this kind of spending profile.)