I hate to be put in this position, but I have to call BS. This entire thread is highly biased towards people who make more: people who make more want to chime in, people who make less are more embarrassed &#x2F; discouraged from chiming in.<p>I&#x27;m a natural (coding since 3rd grade), out of college for 6 years, and I&#x27;ve only known 1 engineer in my career who made over 200k. Now if by BigCo you mean Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, then I don&#x27;t know them, so I can&#x27;t comment.<p>But if by BigCo you mean IBM, Cisco, Intel, etc then I can guarantee you that I don&#x27;t know a single person making 250k, and glassdoor generally corroborates (if you google STAFF (&gt; senior) software engineer in SF for IBM your average is 132 base in SF)