I think that a pretty large percentage of these $300k developer jobs are paying that much due to politics more than skill.

By politics I mean that they have worked within the company to attain that salary, taken the right management positions, kissed the right butts, or maybe just got in early enough and at the right time.

Very few open positions are going to be filled with a starting salary of $300k.

Nah, you don't need to get all political to make those numbers. ~300k total comp is not that hard to obtain as a salary if you meet the following criteria:

1) Are willing and able to work in SF/Seattle/NYC.

2) Have a degree from a decent university (preferably in CS) and about 3-6 plus years of experience.

3) You spend a lot of time prepping for coding interviews (i.e reading https://careercup.com, etc)

See:

https://www.levels.fyi/

Those numbers and levels are pretty accurate albeit a little low based on my experience living in the Bay Area.

The problem is that 300k actually doesn't go that far when you factor in rent/mortgage and the concept of starting a family in those cities.

This is also pretty practical in Boston. I'm at ~$350k (half salary, half stock, with a bit of bonus) as a T5 at Google Cambridge. I don't manage anyone, am not political, and have been programming professionally for ten years (at Google for five).

Cost of living isn't ideal, but $350k is far more than me and my family (wife and two kids) need to live on. I've been donating 50% for several years, and we still are fine.

(Cost of living details: https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2018 The big things are ~$50k on taxes, ~$33k on housing, and ~$20k on childcare.)

There's also

4) Manage to not be a semi-random false negative

There's still the issue mentioned in your GP that there are not that many of those jobs out there to begin with. Also, there are more people who want them then there are slots.

Note that I agree about not needing to get political to get these roles. I just disagree about how easy it is to obtain them.

I agree with you. "Easy" is very subjective and to be fair, I never said that meeting any of my 3 criteria was going to be a walk in the park.

Just getting a visa to work in the USA like I had to do is hard and disqualifies most of the planet (~7.7 billion) people.

Getting into a decent, internationally recognized university is also difficult and likely filters out a huge number of people.

There are several employers paying that much to select from, and companies will reinterview you in a year after a semi-random false negative, so the false negatives are not really a showstopper.

I know several people out of college making $200k+ per year and they don't do anything extremely specialized or participate in crazy politics or management. Just your typical frontend JS dev from a good school, with good experience.

I know several people with 5+yrs of exp making $300k+ per year easily at several companies (not just at FANG).

Caveat: all these people are good at what they do, come from good schools, and have good backgrounds.

This is the real reason startups can't compete in the talent market today. The companies operating at scale can afford to pay high liquid comps for the best talent.

React or Rails or Node job is exactly the kind of work that you would end up doing with that $300k job, especially at the larger employers like Google or Facebook. A lot of engineers leave those companies in search of more complex work.