For someone working in tech on a good salary this should be closer to 50%, easily.
Even paying a high rent, and heading out every night one should be saving at least 25%.
If you're living in California and making $125,000 per year at a job, you're paying $33,000 in income taxes alone. Your 50% savings rate would be $62,500 - after taxes you have $92,000, so the person can live off of $30,000 per year. Rent alone can easily run $1,500 to $2,500 per month. This is an impossible scenario without even getting into the real costs of existing (ie bills, families, debts, vehicle & getting to work, accidents, problems, charity, social life, doing things).
My ex, who lives in Los Angeles, and makes $70k per year in the medical field, can't save more than $400 to $500 per month max after all costs and taxes. That savings is inevitably slashed in half due to once-per-year events that cost a few thousand dollars to fix. Her only salvation is her 401k.
If you want a family, it's a different story.
The average savings rate from 1959 to 2014 was 6.82%. [1]
[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-savin...
[1] http://hosted.ap.org/specials/interactives/_business/debt_ad...).
When I ran the numbers through my head before making the original comment I assumed the savings would be 25-50% of take-home pay, so with the necessary taxes taken out. Which I would argue should still be more than a measly 6% of the total.
The other point to make is that a mortgage would count as savings, since you're paying off a rather large purchase as opposed to paying rent. That and most people would be putting the savings away to buy a residence in the first place.