I know they sound like fantasy (I&#x27;m from the US but certainly didn&#x27;t hear numbers like this while I was still in school), but believe me, they&#x27;re very real. They&#x27;re a relatively small subset of programmer salaries, but they&#x27;re still big enough to cause an upward pulling effect on other companies, such that average software engineering salaries seem to be much higher in the US than in Europe, too.