Must be a location thing. I'm in NJ and I hear a lot of the graduating seniors getting offers in the 50-60 range aound here. 80 is a great offer. And most of these guys consider a bittorrent client in java to be big and scary, so someone who actually knows what theyre doing could probably do a lot better..if you're willing to write back-end shit for goldman or merrill or whatever.
By "most of the country" I mostly meant two coasts: Seattle, Oregon (Portland), California, Boston/NY/DC. Plus some other technology hubs: central Texas (Austin) and Chicago. That is not a small list of cities, certainly deserves to be called "most of the US", weighted by population.
You're an evil person for throwing out a challenge like that to a map/demography nerd :). A little trip to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropoli... and a little spreadsheet gives 75 million if you only count LA/SF/San Diego in CA, or 85 million if you count all of CA. That's 25-30% of the US population, hardly most.
Now if you were to count GDP of those metro's, I'm guessing you'd be around 50% or more of the country.
