This high salary is for people with a certain level inside, most people don't even reach L6 (which still has a high total comp of ~500k). It's often RSU package

This high salary is for people with a certain level inside, most people don't even reach L6 (which still has a high total comp of ~500k). It's often RSU packages and bonus that pushes the total annual compensation so high. But for many tech companies its not unusual on west coast for a normal senior position to have a base of 200k, and then restricted stock units in a similar (maybe little lower) range every year. Plus you get a bonus payment of about 20% of your base salary (can be more or less based on performance). Stock doubled or tripled for msft, amzn, etc... in last two years. That all makes things expensive, big gap between what people can afford, lots of homeless people,... and we engineers generally think we deserve being paid so much while the world around us goes down. Lol. So going for jobs that pay even more, when most engineering jobs are already paying insanely well compared to average pushes the company in a certain direction character wise.