I think you can get close to at 200k benchmark as inflation hits. Regardless, companies that are even edging to that mark are mini wannabe faangs and will use the same hiring process.
but then inflation hits, and so the money is worth less than before - so you didn't really get ahead at all.
Then I got distracted, dropped out of graduate school and didn’t think about consulting companies anymore.
Fast forward to 2020 (and a decade of letting my career stagnate until 2010), I was looking at the same companies because I was interested in cloud consulting.
I found out that consulting companies haven’t kept up with inflation…