Question: are people really making $200k+ with 5 years experience? Or is it simply that high-earner outliers are more vocal online about their salary than average earners, creating a false appearance that $200k+ salaries are more common than they actually are in real life?
At FAANG companies, it's not unheard of for new SWE grads to command $200k+ starting compensation. For someone with 5 years experience at the company it would actually be unusual for them to make less than $200k, in the US at least. This resource is pretty accurate for the lower levels, in my experience: https://www.levels.fyi/
I wish levels.fyi did a better job with locations. You can filter individual salaries by location but it doesn't seem like you can do anything else by location (e.g. filtering the charts or the ranges or anything else). Even with the big tech companies location has a big impact. Google is not paying SF salaries to people in Pittsburgh.