That's a stretch. A staff/senior staff engineer (or equivalent) at FAANG will top out at mid-six figures annually, maybe more than that if there was a lot of stock appreciation since it was granted.
Nitpick: From the PoV of the (public tech) employers, they typically look at compensation not including appreciation of the restricted stock. It's typically "base + bonus + new stock grant value" or sometimes "base + bonus + value of the restricted stock that vests this year, but using the value at GRANT time, not at VEST time".
More specifically as an employee, I think any incremental value from holding the stock is not compensation FROM the company, since the employee equally has to carry the risk of stock prices going down.
Of course, practically, one's cash flow in any given year is "base + bonus + actual value of the stock that vests in the given year" and can be vastly different from how the company does compensation planning. And this is also what determines income taxes (unless I'm bizarrely mistaken about how income taxes work in some jurisdictions).
Having been a manager at multiple public tech companies, I'll say that this has led to very many 'interesting' comp conversations and not everyone comprehends the distinctions here -- regardless of what's arguably more 'correct'.
Thank you. I’ve gotten a bit tired of hearing people talk about their absurd compensation as though it’s their yearly earning and that everyone should get it, only to ignore the part about it vesting quarterly starting 1 year after reception, over 4 years.
When people talk about comp, they usually talk about the # of $$ they took home last year - anything else is magic money so to speak.
For the same reason a manager isn't going to value a $10MM grant in company that ended up being a penny stock, he isn't going to downgrade a company that resurrected from the pits either. Money in hand last year is the best measure possible/available.
That's not what it looks like on levels.fyi. It's regularly:
"SDE 1, 110k + 75k stock options", and then levels.fyi will declare that 185, not 110 + 0, 112 + 38, 115 + 19, 120 + 19
edit: and then people will come on here and say "look! Brand new Google employees make 200k!"
Looking at how they handle Google, for example they show base|annual stock|signing bonus.
So when you see 130K base + 33K stock, that was a grant of 130K vesting over 4 years. And then with signing and annual bonus of ~20K, that person is in fact making 200K starting (although the median is probably a bit lower for a completely new employee).
On the other hand, people often forget about refreshes when looking at these things. And while a refresh grant won't be as large as the initial grant, they do make the overall comp significantly larger.
Most people give their total compensation as their base salary + (initial grant / vesting period). It is an annual figure, but only a good proxy for year 1.
In later years the situation is more complicated as the stock price will move, you'll receive annual refreshes which are performance dependent, and you might reach a new level. While the base salary changes with levels can be modest, 15% or so, refresher targets can practically double from level to level.
There is definitely a class of staff/seniors making seven figures in FAANG - this may be because of stock growth, 'special' bonus stock awards from extreme performance or retention, matching offers etc.
But yes - these won't be the public / known numbers. These folks have no incentive to make it public and affect their own future numbers.
Depends on your definition of valuable, I suppose. Directors and equivalent ICs (L8 / Principal level) or above can and do get over $1M in annual compensation even before appreciation. At F/G anyways.
