Yeah, so... plenty of software engineers are making $500k a year. That is total compensation; you should expect half of that to come from non-salary things like stock options and bonuses.

Maybe some people are lying, but that seems about right to me for actual senior people (leading projects, maybe managing people).

My last year at Google, my W2 income was in the area of $300,000. I was a "level 5" with good performance reviews, and the scale goes up to 9. I sold all my stock the second it was issued ("autosale"), so the W2 income is pretty close to the amount of cash I got.

Programmers focused on the right task are worth their weight in gold. There are very few fields where an hour of time put in can save society as a whole thousands of hours. Software engineering is one of those, and we get to skim off a little bit of that value we created in the form of cash.

Unfortunately, the 'right' tasks for high TC are too often things like Google+

There is also much software that is complete garbage. If the ones with $500k TC are writing decent software, then those making $100k may be writing the garbage.

Depends a lot on where they're working. I know more than one person that had 15+ years experience that was making around 100k/year, then moved to a FAANG and hit > 500k total compensation in just a 2-3 years.

For OkCupid there's a clear motivation for exaggerating things like height, looks, and income. What motivation does one have for anonymously posting an exaggerated income? Are there really that many trolls who want to depress those making less than $500k/yr?

People like in anonymous communities all the time. One motivation would be to impress other (perceived-to-be) successful members so to be asked for stories to tell, for advice, etc.

I don’t know why people are like that, but anonymity thins out the middle group of semi-/socially-truthful people by providing an opportunity to be much more honest or much less honest than is normally possible.

$500k is achievable total compensation at a few companies for some people, though.