Exactly half of US devs earn at or below the median. Which also means half earn at or above it (ignoring the small percentage at exactly the median). I don’t know where you’re statistic comes from but obviously for most of the companies in the OP, salary is only part of the compensation with stock being another part. So someone with a salary of $105k at such a company probably earns more than that when you include stock/bonus.

A median being much lower than the numbers reported by the article could be explained by a few things:

1. That compensation is bimodal

2. That there are more people at more junior levels than at senior levels (either more people coming into the field or older people leaving or more experienced people changing roles to e.g. management at some companies and no longer counting towards the ‘software engineer’ category)

I think it’s a bit of both, but good data is hard to come by.

I don’t know about your circumstances. I don’t know what your constraints are. If you are in the United States, I would encourage you to suppose that a path like the one described in the article is reasonably achievable for a software engineer in the United States[1]. If you think it is true and that you are therefore unfairly treated, then maybe you would re-evaluate your opportunities and consider interviewing (yes this process sucks…) to try to find out whether or not it really is true, as you’d have a lot to gain and not much to lose. If you think it’s true and that you are in an acceptable position then you can avoid having an emotional reaction to threads where people state that the thing you think is true is true. If you think it’s false and it turns out that you were wrong, you may regret not acting sooner. If you can’t participate in the US labour market, that’s quite different. For example many experienced software engineers in the U.K. will earn less than $70k though I don’t have statistics to hand. Larger companies offer higher pay now but the market seems quite different from the one in the US.

I hope you don’t think I’m attacking you. I’d like you to feel like you’re able to make deliberate, informed decisions rather than that it is all luck.

[1] If you believe it is achievable for someone working at these big tech companies, consider that there aren’t that many software engineers in the United States and that a rough low lower bound for the number of engineers employed by companies meeting the above description would be 100k (I think the real number is >3x higher, but this 100k number could be found by looking at a small number of companies) so in percentage terms, it can’t be too uncommon to work at such places.

A second thing to say is that high compensation in the US does not require you to live in Silicon Valley or New York. Many well-paying large tech companies have satellite offices in smaller metros offering only slightly lower pay, or offer remote work with either no cost of living adjustments, or an adjustment that still allows for high compensation.

A third thing is that opportunities aren’t equal, for example hardware engineers, game developers, and possibly people in the embedded space tend to be paid (potentially much) more poorly than more general software engineers.

Finally, maybe everything will change. I don’t have a great reason for software engineers to be so highly paid and there might be some big crash or other correction that stops that being the case.