Really? My starting salary as a level 1 engineer in the first dotcom boom was $115K. Now had I taken a more fun (but as it turns out in reality frequently not very fun) job in the game industry, that salary would have been ~$70K. This of course is an industry segment with its own crazy outliers.

Fortunately, someone sensible figuratively smacked me upside the head and convinced me to take a more practical job (which ended up pretty fun actually).