There are only so many high paying jobs. When someone on HN says that they have a £100k+ job in the UK, that means that it's possible for some number of people to get those jobs but not everyone who's on £40k can double or triple their salary, there aren't enough opportunities to do so.
I was a mid level - seniorish engineer at the time. We initially discussed that 6 figure role, but I did not feel ready at all. They said it was fine and that the range for the level below was £75-85k, which I thought was pretty good. It was a big corp in the health industry btw.
It was a combination of factors such as very specific problems being solved in an industry I was clueless about, a tech stack I had never worked with, etc. In that kind of situation I would rather take an IC role initially and step up later on.
