So does mine. I just spent a few minutes researching this on Payscale, which confirmed the impression I already had: someone with a degree from a good school an

So does mine. I just spent a few minutes researching this on Payscale, which confirmed the impression I already had: someone with a degree from a good school and a lot of experience can easily get an offer around $150k from one of the better companies in the bay area (assuming one interviews well). Their median was $148k, in fact. Numbers like $300k or $500k are not typical for software engineers, even in the best companies. And remember that not everyone works for one of the top companies. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in California (not sure about the bay area, although that has to account for a lot of them), most of them are well out of their twenties, and most of them don't work for Google or Facebook or anything as prestigious or well-funded.