Does this make anyone else feel extremely underpaid? I'm a software engineer at Fortune 200 company in a major metropolitan city, making about 30K less than these guys. It's not a technology company, so that must be the difference.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would work for someone else for peanuts.
It's higher than the median household income.
There's a very real premium to working on cool stuff.
Although I believe the Bay Area's[1] "high cost of living" is frequently exaggerated, I also believe, however, that it can't be dismissed. If I had to put a number on it, it would be $10-$30k annually.
[1] The location of all employees at each company may be applying a selection bias, since I don't believe Facebook has more than a tiny fraction of its employees outside of the Bay Area, whereas the same cannot be said of Google.
Only 6.5% of US workers make 100K or more, according to this: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%24100K+income
It's either just colourful language, or indicates that the writer is out of touch with reality.
I find the denominator of the entire US[1] to be somewhat misleading, as I said. More importantly, however, I found the emphasis to be on the working for someone else, not the magnitude of the salary.
Perhaps even more importantly, the high annual salary may translate to a low hourly rate, especially with a long commute and on-call duty. For some, this may be such a substantial reduction in quality of life, that the salary is low enough to resemble a legume.
[1]Do all US workers in the above denominator include self-employed contractors?
For example, the range of reported salaries for "Software Engineer" at Google is 70k to 133k. Titles like "Senior Software Engineer" and other variants are reported in different groups.
Of course, I work in the energy industry, so that is probably the critical difference. This industry has cash.
I also don't have a sense for the range of experience levels represented by these figures. That's not insignificant.