Another anecdote. I'm in the Midwest of the US and you won't get that kind of comp without getting closer to the money than an IC.

But we can do this all day. Without larger studies or well run surveys it doesn't say much to those who aren't some combination of very talented, lucky, or well connected.

Edit: some, not done

At a Canadian company? A while ago I took a position with a US company who offered quite a bit more than the Canadian org I left. Would be happy to return to Canadian tech but haven't found shops where the money is comparable. TBF haven't been aggressively searching though, but curious about your experience.

so they started you out at 330k? what were the determinants going into that starting offer? that's pretty great

This forum does select for particularly passionate engineers, that seem to be mostly in the US (assumption). The US happens to have the highest paying software jobs. Even still I feel like this forum selects for higher paid engineers through selection bias, and those willing to discuss salary are likely those on the higher end. I always forget this and feel a bit disappointed with myself when reading these discussions.

I checked indeed and it tells me the average US software engineer salary is $110k, and Cali being $136k. Indeed isn’t a perfect source but that seems more realistic than the idea you can get from here where people talk about $300k total comp