It seems silly to ignore stock and bonuses. My base salary is only ~$150k, but with stock and bonuses I'll make over $260k this year (Google). Would this compare with a job that also gives a $150k salary but nothing else?
The main point is that ignoring the stock and bonus portion of the compensation leaves a huge portion of the story missing. And stock at a publicly traded company, whether it's Amazon, Facebook, Google, or IBM, is quite different from equity at a start up....
At Staff Engineer and above, the levels are more about the scope of your responsibilities at Google, and while compensation is somewhat correlated to that, there are other factors.
If you can drive huge amounts of value to the bottom line, either via innovations that save the company $$$ or by working on a project which is "up and to the right", in my experience sooner or later you will be compensated for it --- either at your current company, or somewhere else. Google is pretty good at making sure it's "at your current company".
And so long as you are doing something that you love, does it really matter what level you are at? Personally, for me it's less about the money, since I have enough to be comfortable, and I haven't gotten really expensive habits (like wanting to learn how to fly, or drive race cars, or children to put through college :-). So it's it's more about doing what I love, and doing it in the company of smart people who are fun to be with. Figuring ways of making this intersect with adding as much value as possible to the company is just a bonus.
As far as the need to continue to derive new value to the company, of course! This is true everywhere; the phrase "what have you done for me lately" is one that is not unique to any one company, and would _you_ respect someone who did one great thing many years ago, and then proceeded to rest on his or her laurels?
Of course there are many different ways of adding new value. If you can demonstrate how a new cache server is faster or more scalable, and thus can drive value to the company, that's certainly one way. Or maybe there is new technology, such as faster networking technology or faster flash storage, which means that assumptions made five years ago are no longer true, and that can be a justification to rewrite some part of the infrastructure. But Google is a data-drive company, which means you need to be able to justify why the rewrite is necessary.
This is why life is sometimes easier for the infrastructure teams; increasing disk or CPU utilization by even a fraction of a percent, when multiplied across a large number of systems, can be a big number.
Now, if your product which is measured as having a small number of users, and worse, that number is decreasing over time (which was the case with Google Reader, as has been publicly disclosed), the problem is not that you don't have metrics, but the metrics aren't telling you want might have necessarily wanted to hear. Down and to the right; that's a different story...
First, the salary is completely guaranteed. Short of getting laid off or the company failing completely, you'll get your salary; bonuses can be canceled at most companies and may even be quite unpredictable. Stocks may have a vesting schedule and are subject to the financial markets. Google might be a little more predictable in this way, but many companies aren't.
For instance, how comfortable would you be choosing a bigger mortgage on the basis of your bonuses and stocks rather than your salary? Chances are it's your base salary which will really determine how much of a house you'll buy, because you don't want to foreclose because your bonus one year wasn't as high as you had hoped or the stocks went down. Even if your salary were a guaranteed $260k, you couldn't afford a $1M home by most conventional wisdom (median SF home price as of 2013).
Second, as a result of the foregoing, I've noticed many companies are extremely hesitant to give huge base salaries to developers. It is therefore interesting to see how frequent it is for people to have salaries of $200k+.
I'm a Google Software Engineer III (one level below lefthander and presumably two or three levels below lefthander2) and I haven't been at the company a long time (no stock refreshes or pay rises since joining).
My base salary is ~$130k but I conservatively expect that my salary+stock+bonuses for this year will total to be above $190k.
This makes me believe lefthander and lefthander2's numbers, taking into account their seniority.
Being an early/mid stage hire at a startup with a high probability for failure, transition, or dramatic restructuring may well make both bonus and options grant promises little more than wallpaper.
And for a typical young engineer starting out with little experience in either negotiating such terms or understanding how they work and the associated probabilities, making a rational and accurate assessment is at best difficult.
So: no, they're not something you'd completely ignore, but (as with other forms of indirect payment, compensation, revenue, etc.) they make determining fair market price rather more difficult.
Thing is, other polls included non-base compensation, and the opposite argument gets brought up. But yeah, let's try liquid next time.
Also: this is exactly the class of anecdote I was hoping to hear today. Thanks. Maybe I should go respond to that Google recruiter that keeps emailing me..
Second market tradable shares and public company shares are easily valued. Anything else has an average value of <$10K, based on a sampling of actual new-startup performance.
Even check glassdoor to verify: http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Senior-Software-Engin...
146k base + 32k cash + 41k stock = $220k (everyone gets bonus and stock). And this averages data before the raise Google gave everyone.
Glassdoor also suffers from the same problem. It's voluntary, unverifiable data. Using it as a source does not help your credibility.
As for verification, I'll bet you lots of money at 10:1 odds that these are accurate within 10k (flux depends on stock price).