$500k a year is unbelievable to me (so is $200k)
This wasn't at a FAANG, and this wasn't in the Bay Area. The guy was a stellar developer but he didn't have a PhD or anything and was only 5-7 years out of school.
We got to talking one day and he said that the only reason he's making so much is that he was at the right place at the right time, he worked for this place before and they asked him to come back, and offered an insane rate to do so.
Making $200k to $500k in the industry isn't hard (the actual work). The hard part is finding a company that needs someone of your skill level and are willing to pay whatever they need to. Finding that job is going to be the really hard part.
$320k as a contractor works out to $160k per year if you're comparing to a W2 salary working directly for the employer, which takes into account taxes, health insurance premiums, job security, unemployment insurance premiums, 401k, HSA, Dependent care FSA, and tons of other tax benefits of W2 income.
Not to mention you usually get 4+ weeks off as a salaried employee, and probably have to work fewer hours in total.
Contractors also rarely have a level of stability where they can work every week. Things crop up - your periodic contract renewal takes a week or two to get approved by legal, stuff like that. These factors are broadly why hourly contracting rates can get pretty high.
You might not be billing the time you went to the loo, or made yourself a coffee.
Every other professional in the world is.
Are you seriously only billing 4 hours for a full day's work?
Think of it the opposite way round, of when you're in the shower and have the 'ah-ha' moment of how to structure the code. Or the evening stroll after dinner when you suddenly find that nice elegant solution to the gnarly code. Do you run home and put those 5 minutes in toggl? Because it took your brain far more than those 5 minutes to get there.
We have an intellectual job, the down-time is as necessary and critical to the solutions as the time tapping keys. My brain is churning away in the background, laying things out, figuring out solutions. And that's all extremely valuable subconscious processing time that's not going on my own or other client's projects.
Either ways, I've always been met with some degree of rancor when people realize that some devs on the west coast make $$$ for doing stuff that isn't rocket science (ex: shoveling protos around). So the downvotes are not terribly surprising.