Tons of companies claim "we would pay [huge number]", or "there's no upper bound of income for the best talent". It's almost never true.
Keep in mind, Mr Palmer chose to make this claim very publicly, and he's gotten plenty of attention at this point for doing so. So I'd love to see a good journalist follow up with some real numbers here.
If he's telling the truth, well then, good for him! I tend to be skeptical about people who claim there is a shortage, since they almost never talk about what they're offering. Mr Palmer is.
So far, so good. But he should be willing to offer some real evidence of this claim. Let's see the numbers.
$600k isn't that hard to make at these companies.
The reason I'm skeptical is that while I do know people at google as relatively senior dev (very talented, elite CS degrees, 15+ years experience), they were well above 200k a year, but nowhere close to 600k. This was also more than 2 years ago.
Again, I understand data isn't public, but do you have something to support the notion it isn't hard to make 600k as a dev?
What everyone replying fails to realize is that if you include the appreciation of the preliminary and refresher grants these engineers are making >$400K rather quickly.
I suppose some of this may turn on what you mean by "rather quickly" for compensation in excess of $400k a year (let alone $600k/yr, which seems very high). I can't say you're wrong, because I don't have evidence... but that's the problem here, I don't have any evidence to believe you either. You're claiming everyone is failing to realize something, but in the absence of credible and available data.
Just give me something here. I can be convinced by evidence, but references to documents "floating around" just isn't enough for me, as it contradict my direct conversations with google employees, though my conversations are limited, slightly old, and personal information may be unreliable.
$250k, sure, that squares with what I've heard.
$250K is accurate assuming zero/normal stock appreciation. Assume half that is in equity compensation with a 38% (for FB) growth rate on a 4 year schedule and determine what the figures get to.
That's at least 1 case that appears to support this.