[eganist]

Can't share datapoints from where I work, but competitive datapoints I've gotten vary from 300k total comp to 800k total comp for senior, staff, principal engineers as well as managers in SF, LA, and DC (though DC is on the lower end). To your point, salaries tend to swing between 150 and 350, but the rest is made up with bonuses and especially stock comp.

Netflix recently advertised an eng mgr role for appsec with a published TC ceiling of 900k, for instance. They even wrote that into the linkedin JD.

That said, the higher you go on TC, the higher the risk that the company doesn't have much of a social contract with its staff and may in fact have a deleterious relationship with society at large - e.g Meta. Not always true, but generally yes.

levels.fyi is pretty comprehensive.

[seattle_spring]

Nothing about this article or thread is taking about total comp. It’s talking about specifically base salary. ~$200k is in-line with plenty of companies’, even large ones’, bands for L5 FTEs.

[xvector]

Pre-IPO stock is vapor money.

[seattle_spring]

Ok. Regardless, you're not going to get a cash offer at a startup that rivals the "today" dollar value of a publicly traded company offering RSUs as compensation. Whether the risk is worth it to you or not is a different and unrelated discussion.