Originally I was in R&D, took 16 years to pass $100k, but it was a smaller company that did not pay super highly. I also had to basically spend until age 30 in "education" for the job, including a post-doctoral position. The upside to a STEM job like that is pretty good job security, the down side is not a lot of upward mobility pay-wise unless you are in a really hot field and can job hop, or go into management or marketing.
I'm now in more of a specialty area that combines technical and business knowledge, and is significantly more lucrative. If you can combine STEM/programming knowledge with business, financial, and sales/marketing kinds of areas the pay is likely to be a lot better.
I think the two keys to making a lot of money in a job are;
1. It has to be something that is fairly time consuming and/or hard to learn. If they can train you in a week, they aren't going to pay that much. With some of the government stuff, the time consuming part is figuring out how to navigate the system to get in.
2. It has to make someone ELSE even more money. It might take me 10 years to learn how to build a 1/20 scale model of the Eiffel tower from toothpicks, but that doesn't mean someone will pay me $100k/year to do it.