Sadly, in the Bay Area $4166 is almost exactly what an exempt employee making $100K actually takes home every month.

True, an engineer could make twice as much, but discussing compensation rather than strategy might be missing the forest for the trees.

Why do the Mailpiles believe privacy is the best angle to help people the most in taking email back? If you were to work on only one thing to fix email, would privacy be the most important thing to work on?

The counterargument here isn't examples of specific cloud services like Dropbox that people can trust. It's an argument for general global security. Organizations like the United Nations Security Council and NATO generally provide a much stronger joint defense against evil than individual pieces of armor offered to citizens.

Huh, I mental math failed, but grats on your success.

There certainly are engineering jobs at $150K and higher, but every survey I've seen -- and this more or less matches the offers I've seen -- suggests the median engineering salary here is just a little over $100K.