> There are also many junior developers outside of big cities who have salaries more in line with the $60K range you listed. These are not talked about often on HN but they exist.
I was one of these for many years in the late 2000s when I first started using Hacker News. One of the things that I think people in the Hacker News bubble seem to miss is that programming/software engineering is a passion for some and just a paycheck to others. There are a lot of fields where a job being just a paycheck to you aren't looked down on - a lot of people in the Hacker News bubble look down on that. My work at that company was just a paycheck while I gained skills on the weekends and eventually started my own consulting company. I credit reading Hacker News for showing me that the best way to start a company is, well, to just do it.
I worked for a company that needed a developer to keep their pile of ETL logic and server code working as the data formats they acquired from various government agencies and the requirements of their downstream customers changed. I joined right out of college with a salary during my first three months of $48k with the understanding that it would be increased after the first three months - it eventually settled at $56k for the first year. It was a small company that fluctuated between 3 and 8 full-time employees, not counting management. I made a respectable living during the recession in 2008 because my work still made the company money - I was the only full time programmer there at the time. My ending salary with the company in the mid 2010s was $72,000 in a large south-eastern city where that was above the average salary in the area - in line with CoL.
The flipside of making money in a recession when there are still paying clients is when the business loses out on a major contract to a competitor when there's no recession on. Despite riding out the entire recession (with only a small cut to salary due to a four day work-week instead of a five day work-week), the loss of a major contract by my employer meant that the previously stable funding source that allowed me to continue working dried up there. Less than a month after that I was let go, and had to move cross-country to find stable employment as a software contractor. I eventually joined that company full time and my consulting activities have slowed down significantly.
More to the question of this topic - after they let me go, they had two people at the company - the owner, who was the president of the company, and the owner's wife, who was the business manager. The president of the company, who was previously my boss, started maintaining the things I worked on, and offered me some 1099 remote consulting work when occasionally overwhelmed as a way to pick up some of the slack. That's how his small business handled having a software engineer when needed - occasional contracts to fill the hole.