I'd assume, although I'd have to admit I don't know for sure, that opportunities for pay are similar in New York/Chicago/San Francisco as they are here in London, UK. By which I mean that if I could find a job here in London paying me £150k then there'd be some equivalent job paying $250k (i.e. simply FX'd) in the USA. From what I've seen on the internet and of friends in the last five years, salaries for similar work at similar levels do seem roughly equivalent (maybe slightly better in the US).

If you wanted to earn £150k in the UK at age 29/30 (leaving university at 21/22 with 3 + 5 years of work as I suggested) one way would be to work in financial IT. A salary of £70-100k wouldn't be unreasonable if you were very good and a bonus of 50-100% would be possible, again if you're very good. I'm not in this situation myself so don't speak form direct experience but I know people in the industry who almost certainly are (it'd be rude to ask...).

If this all sounds far fetched, I work at a fund which is on track to make a profit per employee of around $500k this year (and as everyone knows, this is a bad year). Even given that bonuses are skewed towards the researchers that means they can still afford to reward the best IT people handsomely. And they're sensible enough with money to know that there are people in IT who they really couldn't afford to lose so they will pay accordingly.

I've seen and hired alot of $100-$125 an hour Flash Engineers in NYC who were in their mid to late 20's (Advertising) and I've also seen and know quite a few J2EE (Especially Tibco?) Engineers earning similar hourly amounts in Finance.

Most of these are permalance arrangements, those numbers will get you up in >200k range.

Sure.

Get into computers/UNIX/Linux when you're 13. Start working at startups when you're 15 as a junior sysadmin/scripter. Continue doing contract work through college. Become an expert UNIX developer by the time you are 21.

After college, work a few years for a company doing a high-end specialty product such as enterprise search or ERP system. Work on big client accounts. You want to beef up your resume at this point.

After 4 years start your own consulting firm in this space. Earn $150/hr+ for 30 or so hours/week doing consulting work and charge $5k/month/server for managed hardware running aforementioned enterprise platforms.

At this point you'll easily be making $250k, probably closer to $350k.

Or you could learn how to program in college and spend years 21-30 writing shitty web apps for startups, hoping to strike it rich when you're not a founder (stupid). This is what most people do.

Moral of the story: either do high end enterprise work, or be a startup founder. You will surely get screwed otherwise. This is a brutal industry and those who don't choose their paths wisely become wage slaves who make significantly less than blue collar tradesman.