This is the ladder for just about everything outside of specialized medicine and law. There's just not that many people outside of management anywhere with a $250k+ salary. There's plenty of people who make that much, but it's usually through commissions, additional equity, etc..
Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft employ over 500,000 people. I'd be surprised if there are more than 500 engineers with a salary over $250k between them.
Maybe what someone should do is poach all 500 and see what they come up with. The burn rate would only be $10 million a month. Maybe they could invent AI.
