I thought the common definition of "total comp" is that 600k (well, less tax) does actually hit your bank account? Is there another definition?
[For the record I've never earned anything like that or heard of any regular software engineers earning that, but I guess it may happen in SV.]
So an example could be. Your salary is 50k, your benefits are calcualted to be 10k, your options ammount to 20k and your bonus is 20k.
Your total comp is 100k, but because options vest slowly you only make 1/4 of that and the bonus did not work out, so your take home salary was 55k + benefits.
This can change depending on the company, role, country, contract etc. Its not really like total comp is a legal definition.
The article is correct in a lot of its characterization. Your output is a lot of documents and strategic influence and not a lot of code (aka “getting things done”). But that doesn’t mean it has to be unfulfilling. You can get things done by making a compelling technical argument based on your experience and convincing hundreds of people to go build the architecture you envisioned. Do you get the thrill of debugging the code at 4am? No, you don’t. You only get that from skunkworks projects and side endeavors. But it’s still gratifying. And it pays embarrassingly well.