I would assume that big companies that are post-investment (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, etc etc etc)

I would assume that big companies that are post-investment (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, etc etc etc) pay out several orders more dollars of salary than companies running on VC. Startups with VC money have to compete against THOSE companies to hire. Engineers here have a great alternatives and can optimize for money, stock, satisfaction, education, connections, etc, so you don't have to stay in a sucky job, low salary, or bad company. That is why salaries are so high. CA as a whole receives about $15B/yr in VC. Assuming every penny of that went to engineer compensation (not at all accurate - customer acquisitions is probably a bigger line item), that would be 75,000 jobs @ $200K company cost (probably low for the Bay Area). So VC directly pays for maybe 5-20K engineers in the Bay Area. Insatiable, rich tech companies are why salaries are high.