At the risk of sounding like I'm boasting, I'll share concrete figures. I earn about $285k USD (~$380k CAD) as an L4 SWE at a FANG company. My top earning friends in BC work at companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Juul and earn about $60-$120k CAD.
And I've said elsewhere in thread, I'd happily move my family down (I'm a US citizen) if I thought it was possible to buy health insurance that would guarantee coverage for all issues. I've heard too many stories of insurance companies refusing to pay for emergency treatments because the hospital happened to be out of network.
Are your top earning friends L4 or equivalent? If not the comparison is worthless.
Those looks very much like junior level salaries. 90-100K$ CAD for a junior position at one of the FANG in Canada is as low as you can go.
I make really good money for my 3 years of experience (compared to others in my city with my level of experience) but it's just such a hilariously large gap at this point that it'd be dumb for me not to at least try and get a job.
It's not particularly useful to make claims that one can earn enormous amounts by changing region without also acknowledging that such an opportunity is only available to a small minority.
Sure, you and your social sphere have done well; but what about the population in aggregate?
Not everyone will or can work at a FAANG, or is competent enough to rise to that compensation level within those companies.
You're comparing SF to the whole Canada. If you zoom in to just Vancouver and Toronto, less than 75k is definitely smaller local companies. Similar to some no-name companies in SF in general won't net you close 200k TC.
SAP new grads TC can hit $100k and this company is considered to pay the least among Salesforce (and Tableau), Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify, Splunk, etc around Vancouver.
Senior Devs (outside the list above) avg base pay in Vancouver is around 130-140k at entry (newly minted Sr. Dev) before bonuses (10-20%), RRSP matching, and stock if the company is public.
Toronto have more tech companies that pay similar avg I believe.
Definitely it's not $285k for intermediate dev (SDE2) for SF Bay but Vancouver and Toronto have established themselves as tech hotspot in Canada leaving the rest.
On the other hand, I agree with you on the point of your saving rate provided that you are young without family. With Family, I believe you have to pay extra health-insurance out of your own pocket. You might have to pay extra for education as well (or pay extra to live in better neighborhood).