No one is choosing between company A offering $60k, B offering $100k, and C offering $350k for the same work, and then choosing A or B. Most people get 1-5 offers all within a relatively small range. The fact that people choose the company with the best environment/project should not be surprising.
Actually this is pretty common amongst a lot of my friends just graduating from school. If you have AI/ML skills, you can often choose between finance, which will make you a millionaire before you're 25, or a hip place that pays you a mediocre salary, or if you're lucky, a hip place that pays you a mediocre salary with good stock options.
I turned down the more guaranteed capital gains at a trading company for a riskier bet in stock options at a company I really like, although only after heavily negotiating. I do not regret it.
* Mediocre is defined here as roughly 85K. That is a shit ton more than anyone else I know who I graduated high school with makes in rural New York. It's all a relative.
Not true for everyone. I've gotten offers between $95-220k recently for a software developer position. I didn't choose the top end, though if given the choice again, I don't know. I also have other friends in the same situation. One chose the top end, the other is still thinking, but will probably choose mid-range. Sorry to be vague and anonymous.
Sure, but that's about as big as the range gets, and it's still much smaller than my example. The point is that people are not choosing between offers that are the difference between night and day.
95k - 220k seems like a pretty big difference to me, that's more than double. I too was in a position not too long ago where I had to choose between a small $X salary at a cool company and a salary of 4*X at a less cool company. I was even leaning towards the smaller salary until I had some health problems kick in and decided that I needed health insurance.
In hindsight, I'm very happy with my decision and glad I didn't drink the kool-aid.
A friend of mine just left Google to work for Goldman Sachs in New York (as an analyst). Google paid her $90k + stock options that brought her salary up to about $160k/year. Goldman Sachs is paying her $390k as an analyst (for her intimate knowledge of Google), with a target bonus of 65% of her salary, and a goal bonus of 120% of her salary.
Some people really are making the choices between such wide ranges.
That's $52k per year, which is comfortably middle to upper-middle class in much of America. If that was in the Bay or NYC then it's low, but if it was in Omaha or Des Moines it's a good salary for an entry level dev.
