So the point is that in a super tight housing market, it doesn&#x27;t take that many outliers to have a big effect on housing prices.  Obviously I&#x27;m aiming at fairly high-end developers--like people with Ph.D.s or a decade of industry experience.  But there are tens of thousands of people like that in San Francisco.  And I&#x27;ve seen google, facebook, salesforce, vmware, and the like offer unbelievable compensation to these people when I&#x27;m trying to hire them.<p>The pattern is such that I don&#x27;t think people are lying.  In some settings, lying about offers could be a way to get leverage, but these people are not trying to negotiate--they know a small company can&#x27;t offer those kinds of salaries, and do not ask for a counteroffer.<p>That said, note that I am not talking about salary, but &quot;total compensation.&quot;  Obviously prospective employers have an incentive to paint as rosy a picture as possible about that.  So the base salaries might be even slightly under $200K, but with hefty guaranteed bonuses for the first year or two plus stock grants worth in the hundreds of thousands of dollars even if the stock stays flat.<p>Another way to look at this is that the housing market is a function of three things:  income, interest rates, and the fraction of people&#x27;s income they are willing&#x2F;able to spend on housing.  So obviously interest rates have been super low recently, and maybe people have increased the fraction of their pay they spend on housing--but that still can&#x27;t go above 100%.  The main driver of the San Francisco housing crisis is soaring income (and of course inequality) combined with inadequate supply.