You want it to be one way... but it's the other way. -Marlo, from The Wire As other commenter's have pointed out, the data you're citing is completely wrong a

You want it to be one way... but it's the other way. -Marlo, from The Wire As other commenter's have pointed out, the data you're citing is completely wrong and/or woefully out of date. There's always 4 parts of compensation that you need to look at: -Base -Target bonus (depending on your level could be 15%-20%+) -Initial stock grant -Refresher stock grant (offered each year to protect you from a cliff) An incoming SWE with 1yr experience at Google would scoff at a total compensation of $125k (this would normally be the bare minimum base salary). Same goes for Facebook. And while Netflix isn't known to hire junior engineers, it is well known in the bay area that they usually pay top of market rates fully in cash; this routinely exceeds $300k and much more so for seasoned engineers.