The position above, Senior Engineer, averages $130k.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for 1,500 people to understate their earnings by 50%+ on an anonymous poll, especially a poll of engineers at one of those most engineering-centric companies in the world, where corrupting a dataset would likely feel akin to high treason.
Not inclined to trust second-hand information from one individual - sounds like they're either working at a much higher level than regular programmer, inflating their salary by including perks/stock/etc to make it seem higher, an extreme outlier, or just lying (people who tell their friends how much they earn in casual conversations also sound like the kind of people who would inflate that number).
I believe this post. I took a peek at the MSFT numbers on glassdoor, and either they are salary-only or total compensation packages have been reduced significantly since I was a manager ~6 years ago. I remember the general salary ranges for each of the levels (those titles correspond to numeric level ranges which had fixed salary, bonus, and stock ranges), and the glassdor numbers are reflective of salary data, not stock.
Stock would be hard anyway because they vest over N years so how much you vest in a given year depends on a) your promotion velocity b) whether you got any gold stars/special bonus grants and c) how you ranked within your peer group.
They are, but consider that they are very volatile. When I worked at Yahoo, my stock added an equivalent of about $50k/year to my total compensation for the period I worked there. But I was lucky - I joined at a low and left and cashed out all my options with Yahoo trading at one of its highest amounts of the last 7-8 years.
At the same time I had people working for me who had 10 times as many options, but had been in the company for ages and received the vast majority of those options before the crash in 2000. As of this year, the couple of those people who are still at Yahoo will have options worth maybe $30k-50k total from 10+ years of employment that are over water, and their older options will start expiring soon.
Of course Google people receiving new Google options now are currently in a better position, but estimating the value of options grants over time is tricky.
The issue is the same in principle - just less extreme in that barring a total meltdown you have an easier time assessing the lower end value of the package. But to take the Yahoo example: When I joined, a share was worth about 1/10th of the strike price of the bulk of the options of several people that worked for me. 1/10th would've been a lot better than getting nothing, but still.
You have to be careful when reporting them as part of compensation because they're difficult to value. Stock is easier in an already-public company like Google, although it is still subject to some uncertainty due to vesting schedule. The monetary value of being able to come into work at 11 is going to differ greatly among employees.
The position above, Senior Engineer, averages $130k.
There doesn't seem to be an incentive for 1,500 people to understate their earnings by 50%+ on an anonymous poll, especially a poll of engineers at one of those most engineering-centric companies in the world, where corrupting a dataset would likely feel akin to high treason.
Not inclined to trust second-hand information from one individual - sounds like they're either working at a much higher level than regular programmer, inflating their salary by including perks/stock/etc to make it seem higher, an extreme outlier, or just lying (people who tell their friends how much they earn in casual conversations also sound like the kind of people who would inflate that number).