> are already at the top of the market for most positions (that I’m aware of).
This is not even remotely close to true for high-paying SWE jobs in the Bay, and the part of me that grew up in the middle of nowhere still has a hard time believing it.
Staff engineers make between $500k to $1M a year. My first year at Google I was sat in a row of absurdly high-level engineers, many of whom made even more.
If you still expect 200k raises in such a position you are likely in for a bad time (nothing is guaranteed though, you might get lucky).