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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

35 year olds in the bay are making closer to $300-$500k/yr, not $150k. Probably not that many renting if they don't want to

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That's just not true, not by any stretch. Certainly not for the median salary, and not even for the average, even though that's distorted by the long tail of very high salaries. There are easily-googled studies out there which put mid-career median salaries at $150k at best. If that seems absurdly low to you, that's probably because your friends are a self-selected group (as they are for everyone). Sort of like "how could Nixon win, I don't know anyone who voted for him".

To be clear, my comment applies specifically to software engineers in the bay area

So does mine. I just spent a few minutes researching this on Payscale, which confirmed the impression I already had: someone with a degree from a good school and a lot of experience can easily get an offer around $150k from one of the better companies in the bay area (assuming one interviews well). Their median was $148k, in fact. Numbers like $300k or $500k are not typical for software engineers, even in the best companies.

And remember that not everyone works for one of the top companies. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in California (not sure about the bay area, although that has to account for a lot of them), most of them are well out of their twenties, and most of them don't work for Google or Facebook or anything as prestigious or well-funded.

The median salaries listed on Glassdoor (although not filtered by age) for even senior software engineers in the Bay Area aren't even CLOSE. Your sample is obviously biased (not to mention self-selected).

I am 35 years old, as are most of my friends, and we are all making over $700k right now... Your number seems kind of low?

What gives you the impression that people are making such a small amount of money in the Bay Area?

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