> Are developers in other countries living in such different worlds?
Yes. Back in the my days at $faang in europe it was not uncommon to hear people getting 120-160 k€/year in compensation and we were “poor” compared to us engineers at the same faang (4-500 k$/year total compensation) with a bit of seniority…
That makes a lot of sense! I have no idea how I'd use that much money, so maybe the 128gb MBP for messing around with local LLMs wouldn't sound so absurd :)