[davidjnelson]

I would say principal at most companies maps to l6 at google. In Mountain View that pays $560,000/year total comp on average according to levels.fyi

Non faang pay for principal engineers in Mountain View could be estimated roughly by using stack overflow’s salary calculator. Mountain View, react, typescript, aws, postgres, linux, 20 years experience, no degree lists $187,000 for the 50th percentile.

I think the discussion gets confusing because as an industry we suck at describing levels of the technical track in a portable way.

I do know senior engineers making 150k in the Bay Area. I also know some making 750k.

[stale2002]

Sure, if you are talking about engineers with 20 years experience, those numbers make sense.

But in the context of this conversation, IE people who use triple byte, we are likely talking about engineers with a couple years experience. (Yes, a couple years experience gets you the title of "senior" these days).

And within this context of engineers with a couple years experience who are using triple byte, I'd say that 150k is pretty alright.

You can see this data from the graphs that they posted, about how this is referring to people with a couple years exp.