I am very familiar with the corporate structure both from working in Fortune 500 companies and from working outside corporate, thus understanding it from both sides.
Nowadays large corporations pay a starting salary of 100k+ to a new/raw data scientist, data engineer, or software engineer. After a couple of years and a promotion the salary can easily jump to 120k, and after 2–3 more years to 150k and beyond.
To the person that is not familiar with these inner workings, it might look like the junior data scientist was so talented and dedicated to his/her job to get to 150k in their mid to late 20s???—???a feat that not many other jobs can duplicate.