I might be exaggerating, but I know how much I and my coder friends earn.

Western companies hire much more engineers and adjacents than designers. Consequently, for designers, the income is much closer to a local median. As my perspective is one of a person currently living outside the US or western Europe, I see a huge disparity between pay grades.

For example I reckon in my country say I'm on 150k TC as a senior eng and a senior designer may be on 75k. Using USD conversion. So 2x may be normal. 10x would make me probably in the top 100 highest paid devs in the country except those who got lucky with share comp or own a chunk of the biz.

Don't want to be overly specific, but consider difference between 10-25 and 30-130.

Remotely hired UXers get more competitive compensation, so my original estimation is wrong. But, there's far less of them than SWEs so they don't tend to raise the local pay mean as much.