I have long told recruiters that I'd need something in the $250k range to even consider working as an engineer for a corporate tech shop. The work is brutal. You sell your mental life to hippie robber barons who write emails in all lowercase while siphoning enough energy out of you to buy second-hand nuclear icebreakers for personal yachts.

None of them has yet taken me seriously, but thankfully this reduced the number of calls I was getting.

The average salary for a "software developer, applications" in San Francisco is about $111K a year. In San Jose, it's a bit higher, at 116K a year.

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-developer...

The median price for a 3br house in SF is (I used zillow's numbers for this) 1.1Mil.

(btw, check the pay for the other "top 10" professions in high cost areas like SF. It does make economic sense for top students with good options to choose other fields).