compthrowaway

The sign-on bonuses are amortized over the equity vest period (which is a bizarre way to do it, but whatever). Aggressive L4 offers can clear about $250k/year in equity, so I don't know where you're getting this "at most" quantity...

I've seen (and tried to compete with) mid-level (not quite senior, not quite entry-level) pure SWE (non-AI, infrastructure-type roles) offers with that much equity at public firms.

I'm not convinced you're actually seeing the "very best salaries."

I've not posted my compensation at some firms because it'd be too easy to identify me. I'd say that levels.fyi often _underreports_ what levels of compensation are available to people of a given level.

In a world where (A) compensation is typically mostly in the form of liquid equity grants and (B) compensation amounts change rapidly year-on-year, Glassdoor's system vastly understates compensation in the field.

Nope. The L4ish offers certainly would be far too low if that was 4 years, and these are supposedly "manually verified."

The hovertext also says they explicitly divide by N.

I seriously cannot decide if your post is satire. Directly from the wikipedia article:

http://www.photoshopsupport.com/photoshop-cs4/what-is-new-in...

http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/resize/#liquid-rescale

Yes as long as you're talking about total compensation; I've 7 years of experience in software engineering and my offers are in the 500-600k range of total compensation. Note this is equity value at grant; there is no appreciation (or depreciation) yet.

I recently took one of those offers from a FAANG, swapping a bunch of illiquid startup RSUs for liquid equity compensation.