By politics I mean that they have worked within the company to attain that salary, taken the right management positions, kissed the right butts, or maybe just got in early enough and at the right time.
Very few open positions are going to be filled with a starting salary of $300k.
1) Are willing and able to work in SF/Seattle/NYC.
2) Have a degree from a decent university (preferably in CS) and about 3-6 plus years of experience.
3) You spend a lot of time prepping for coding interviews (i.e reading https://careercup.com, etc)
See:
Those numbers and levels are pretty accurate albeit a little low based on my experience living in the Bay Area.
The problem is that 300k actually doesn't go that far when you factor in rent/mortgage and the concept of starting a family in those cities.
Cost of living isn't ideal, but $350k is far more than me and my family (wife and two kids) need to live on. I've been donating 50% for several years, and we still are fine.
(Cost of living details: https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2018 The big things are ~$50k on taxes, ~$33k on housing, and ~$20k on childcare.)
4) Manage to not be a semi-random false negative
There's still the issue mentioned in your GP that there are not that many of those jobs out there to begin with. Also, there are more people who want them then there are slots.
Note that I agree about not needing to get political to get these roles. I just disagree about how easy it is to obtain them.
Just getting a visa to work in the USA like I had to do is hard and disqualifies most of the planet (~7.7 billion) people.
Getting into a decent, internationally recognized university is also difficult and likely filters out a huge number of people.
I know several people with 5+yrs of exp making $300k+ per year easily at several companies (not just at FANG).
Caveat: all these people are good at what they do, come from good schools, and have good backgrounds.
This is the real reason startups can't compete in the talent market today. The companies operating at scale can afford to pay high liquid comps for the best talent.