If you are a young/new engineer in a bubble you should recognize that excess salary is a function of the bubble, not your actual value. To that end bank as much excess salary as you can, (keep your personal burn rate low) and don't set your internal 'value meter' by a company that so desperately needed engineers they over paid for them.
I saw several engineers in the dot-com crush, graduate, work for a year at some BigCorp, then go to work for a startup as "Chief Architect" or some other vaulted title, lose their job when the crash hit, and then found themselves unemployable at some really vaulted title and salary because they really only had 3 - 4 years experience and it wasn't all that broad. That was sad to watch. Don't be that engineer if this is another bubble.
FYI, I've been seeing a variety of title inflation - lots of "Senior" styled people without the 7-12 years of industry experience to back it up. This seems particularly prevalent in the startup sector.
In my experience, YMMV, etc, etc. Just something I noticed in my looking for work 1H2013.
I saw several engineers in the dot-com crush, graduate, work for a year at some BigCorp, then go to work for a startup as "Chief Architect" or some other vaulted title, lose their job when the crash hit, and then found themselves unemployable at some really vaulted title and salary because they really only had 3 - 4 years experience and it wasn't all that broad. That was sad to watch. Don't be that engineer if this is another bubble.