Hiya Dyeje. My name is Patrick. I was previously the CEO of a recruiting startup, have many friends who work at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and am broadly considered credible on HN. I do not work at AppAmaGooBookSoft and my financial exposure to them is denominated in probably tens of dollars; to the extent I am biased here, my incentives are to convince people to not take their offers.

AppAmaGooBookSoft do, indeed, pay deep into the six figures. Each of them has an engineering ladder, where promotions start off like promotions in grade school. If you're not fired, you make it to level X. (They don't fire many people.) The offer at X is, depending on negotiation skill, phases of the moon, perceived competition (particularly on the initial offer stage), and slight variations in performance, about $450k.

There are promotions available after X. People get them, approximately daily.

There are many people for whom it is not in their interest to tell you this, because it will make their offers or proposed life plans less attractive by comparison. There are many HNers who prefer ignoring reality on this issue, sometimes out of jealousy, sometimes out of pride, or sometimes out of believing that they can reason from first principles what Google should pay a Senior Software Engineer and therefore ignore what Google does pay a Senior Software Engineer.

These people are wrong. The market prints the deals where the market prints the deals.