SOME Silicon Valley engineers are fairly highly paid. Especially so if you only read HN, where there's always someone who's brother's girlfriend's roommate knows someone at Google who makes $250K, therefore this must be an average salary.
$250k isn't at all unreasonable for a SWE who works at Google. And there are tens of thousands of them in the Bay Area. These are not imaginary unicorns we're talking about.
