Big cloud companies are also in a very good position to afford these salaries, mostly because their revenue structure allows for that. The same is not true for

Big cloud companies are also in a very good position to afford these salaries, mostly because their revenue structure allows for that. The same is not true for many other software companies or non software companies that also need software engineers. Silicon Valley salaries are heavily inflated by a few big players and VC money. It doesn't help that we engineers get arrogant and think California salary is the bar for other companies. It's simply not affordable for many companies and the importance of one engineer does also not warrant the salary. Do you think a single software engineer is more important than a mechanical engineer, so he can demand a x multiplier in compensation from the same company? In a cloud scenario like Google maybe, but what if you write software for a car? Factor in the Japanese attitude of "group harmony" and you get a system, where rockstars/10x/whatever get average salaries. Then your 150m is a pretty damn good offer at 150% increase of average starting salary for 10 years experience. There are also differently impactful software engineering positions. The most common crud backend engineer and frontend "ui implementer" don't warrant the salaries Google and co is paying for them (though from what I heard from Google employees, Google hires a lot of talent for positions that don't need that talent). Sure there are very impactful positions, e.g. in tooling and infrastructure that can safe everyone else in the company hours of time. But what's the ratio to the engineers for day to day business? 1:5? Lower? Even higher?