Oh, I don't doubt that at all. Are those standard "senior dev" salaries, though? What's interesting to me about the startup-tradeoffs article (top link of thi

Oh, I don't doubt that at all. Are those standard "senior dev" salaries, though? What's interesting to me about the startup-tradeoffs article (top link of this thread), though, is that you don't need to enter stratospheric levels of career advancement to hit these targets at bigco's anymore. You can't be a lousy dev, but you don't have to be an amazing one or ascend into higher management levels. $250k a year is now a reachable salary for an employee of ordinary advancement (well, a SE or related). You get to senior level, and top out there, and your salary is now high enough that earnings start to rival very good exits from startup. No, not founder level or huge (and rare) IPO successes - those are still out of reach on the "work at a bigco and accumulate". But better than being an early employee at a startup that has a decent buyout or "exit".