It's normally considered a bad salary in comparison to what you could be making. I won't speak for the poster but I left a ~$1m / year TC job ($300k base the rest RSUs) to join a startup. I have a good salary compared to the population at large but it's a fraction of what I could be making on the hope that my equity turns into something meaningful that makes up for it.
The easiest way is to move to the SF area. However, you'll end up spending most of the after-tax pay on housing, food, etc. For example, rent on a 1 bedroom apartment in the suburbs is going to be $30-60K per year:
If you live in the US and work as a software engineer at a top tech company it’s very straightforward to make more than 200k. Otherwise, it’s much harder.
It's not just a matter of place, but what you can have if you work for Google instead. I can make $200k as a freelancer in France, but much more as a Google employee.
Today I'm giving a training to 3 people, each paying 2600 for this training. It means this week they get billed 7800 in total. If you do that for 30 weeks (not even a full year), you get to 234000.
15 years ago, my team leader was already doing $15K month as salary, and it was a startup in Sophia, not Google, and a long time ago.
So it's all possible, but indeed, not the average situation. The median dev is underpaid in France:
