Yeah he said 500k. I Initially thought the same as you, 1-2mil.
500k for a senior dev is actually not too far out there. I have an L3 friend at Google (l3 is new hire level) who has been at the company for almost 2 years and who's total comp is almost 300k. So some L5s and L6s could certainly be pulling in 500k.
I wouldn't rule out $500k for Google. It's not a super reliable source, but Glassdoor lists the average total compensation for a Google staff engineer at $420k.
I doubt Apple, Amazon, or even Facebook pay that much on any regular basis, but I wouldn't rule out someone getting an outsized offer during a machine learning (or other flavor of the month) hiring frenzy.
$300k. I work at Google, have a few good papers, and a couple years of professional experience, and dropped out of grad school. TBH not really clear that I'm doing much better than peers without ML expertise.
If you took a salary cut for the last couple of years to work there then $200k doesn't seem like a lot. That's probably a top engineers sign on bonus at Google.
I think it's simply that they can afford it, and if they don't, their competitors will happily steal the best talent away with higher salaries.
I don't suppose the same situation exists within Google, although I've heard freshly graduated ML hires can get up to $500k, which sounds crazy until you realize China is paying twice as much.
Do you mean $1M per year or over 4 years? 250k per year in total compensation does not seem like that much.
EDIT: Since I am being downvoted, I thought I'd provide some data to back up my claim. The average total compensation for a Senior Software Engineer in the US at Google according to Glassdoor is $267,413.
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