The implication of the article, that such compensation is reasonably possible to a moderately competent software developer working for big companies in the United States, seems pretty reasonable to me. Another thing one could note is the bump in compensation in recent years, which could be a combination of stock going up, more experience making the author a more valuable employee, or market rates for software engineers at large software companies have gone up.
None of the numbers strike me as particularly unusual for the author’s circumstances, so if they strike you as unusual (and you are able to work in the US), then it might be worth considering trying to get yourself into similar employment, if that’s what you’d want. If you can’t work in the US, things are different and potentially a lot worse, but the other thing the OP states is that a professional on a more modest income ought to be able to do well making sensible investments[1] and cutting costs. I think that’s true in basically any developed country.
You claim that the author’s route was not average, but I think it probably was reasonably average for a software engineer working at large US tech companies in NYC/SF/Silicon Valley. The less average thing is perhaps saving lots of money, making reasonable investments, and not having a load of expensive kids.
[1] e.g. 60% of the increase in net worth between 2020 and 2021 comes from investments rather than the ‘earning half a million dollars a year’ and those investments came from earning less than that (obviously such incomes still generally aren’t available to people who aren’t software engineers at big US tech companies, and it may be reasonable to complain that a path that >100k people follow is unreasonable but within this path I think it’s pretty reasonable).
None of the numbers strike me as particularly unusual for the author’s circumstances, so if they strike you as unusual (and you are able to work in the US), then it might be worth considering trying to get yourself into similar employment, if that’s what you’d want. If you can’t work in the US, things are different and potentially a lot worse, but the other thing the OP states is that a professional on a more modest income ought to be able to do well making sensible investments[1] and cutting costs. I think that’s true in basically any developed country.
You claim that the author’s route was not average, but I think it probably was reasonably average for a software engineer working at large US tech companies in NYC/SF/Silicon Valley. The less average thing is perhaps saving lots of money, making reasonable investments, and not having a load of expensive kids.
[1] e.g. 60% of the increase in net worth between 2020 and 2021 comes from investments rather than the ‘earning half a million dollars a year’ and those investments came from earning less than that (obviously such incomes still generally aren’t available to people who aren’t software engineers at big US tech companies, and it may be reasonable to complain that a path that >100k people follow is unreasonable but within this path I think it’s pretty reasonable).