[davidhansen]

The mythical high paying jobs are in the "private sector."

Well, no. In my local market, $120k is very, very well paid for a typical developer at a typical company. The > $120k salaries you see mentioned on HN are an artifact of two types of companies:

1. Venture-backed startups who don't particularly care about cost management.

2. Large, highly profitable software enterprises like GOOG, MSFT, AAPL.

Step outside these two realms, and developer compensation drops very rapidly.