You literally have no idea what you're talking about. Every one of my friends who is a senior software engineer, including myself, at a decent-sized company has a total compensation between $300-400k per year. One of my good friends has a total comp of $650k, with almost $300k base salary. I have friends at Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb, Apple, etc. We all share compensation information with each other.

My friend at a startup is ready to quit because he's only paid $170k for the last 5 years and he regrets not staying at Apple because the shares he left on the table were worth over $1M now. He is now 0/2 in startups, both of which you have heard of, and he's very frustrated.