If she is trying to justify overall regional house prices we need to look at overall salaries, not just senior software engineer salaries.

You said mid-90s, so I will use 1995. Since 1995:

124% increase in SD per capita income
194% increase in SD home prices

So your friend is right that home prices have tripled since the mid-1990s, but wrong that salaries have kept pace. Home prices have increased 56% more than incomes over that period.

This is specific to SD but I doubt that it’s much different for SoCal as a whole.