You do have to zoom in to a specific part of the economy to get these salaries. It’s jobs in the “tech” industry (places like startups, FAANGs, etc) rather than

You do have to zoom in to a specific part of the economy to get these salaries. It’s jobs in the “tech” industry (places like startups, FAANGs, etc) rather than software dev in general. (So not programming stuff for an electric company.) And you have to have a few years experience; it’s not normal to get paid that much for entry level even at some of the biggest tech companies. So that excludes the Midwest for the most part, except remote tech companies are changing that. Places like Automattic or Airbnb (from their recent announcement) don’t pay based on location anymore, and won’t dock your pay if you move to the Midwest. These higher salaries are driven by VC money and demand for sure. In my personal experience and network, small startups, midsize startups, and massive tech companies are are all hiring as much as possible. Plus, the classic startup approach is to use VC money to fund product development by quickly increasing the number of devs, and then figuring out profitability down the road after you have tons of users. This leads to an environment where smaller startups don’t need to cut dev teams or hiring to increase profit margins — the main goal is to build the product asap and grow users. And that means hiring lots of decent devs. And then big companies like Amazon just have loads of money and tons of products that need constant improvement, which only happens with devs. So with significant competition and need to hire devs and lots of available money, developers have space to negotiate pretty great salaries. Again, this varies everywhere and maybe isn’t the same for “non-tech” companies quite as much (because that VC money and massive scale might not exist as much outside of tech).