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.