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A 7-digit salary, or a 7-digit retention bonus / stock grant / whatever? A 7-digit salary would be absurd (Tim Cook didn't even have a 7-digit salary when he was COO), whereas a 7-digit retention bonus is plausible (and lines up much better with your follow-up comment about a "vesting period").

Wow! Google counter offer numbers always fun to hear. Without the risk of divulging too much info, would you share, if he was a back-end, front-end or mobile app developer?

I mean, I would consider doubling or even 1.5ing a pretty big premium.

That's insane though. It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year to a company.

I'm pretty sure there was a vesting period - it wasn't for one year.

It's hard to imagine a single programmer being worth a million dollars a year to a company.

AdWords is worth, round numbers because I'm lazy, $100 billion a year. One million dollars is 10^-5 times AdWords. Want to make a guesstimate as to how many engineers are associated with 10^-2 improvements in AdWords in a given year?