Maybe it is because a large number of HN'ers are currently gainfully employed in the valley and that figures like these can come in extremely handy when interviewing with any company there especially if that company is google.
Datapoints like these are few and far between, sure people lie routinely about their salary but by now I think this thread has given more than enough corroboration to take the original statements by my friend as truthful.
It also nicely showcases that places like glassdoor.com show base salary only but that the total compensation can be much higher, which should factor into any decisions you make with respect to working for big company 'x' (or G in this case) versus running your own thing.
I think it's on HN because such salaries will hunt talented or not even good engineers down and if this happens it could be a really hard time for startups. Let's be real for a second without engineers ideas are worthless and if all of those good ones are at big companies which gives a out a lot of cash what can you do as a startup? I don't it is bad as it sounds but it could be tough and it could kill a lot of startups in future if this attitude by big companies grows.
In the contrast: you don't have to start your company in the Valley to be good and maybe it can save you a lot of headaches and money to not do so.
But at the end the source of this problem is different: the Valley just needs more engineers to get things rolling.
It's absolutely correct that technical ideas are worthless without effective implementation. That said, I strongly suspect that the current crop of startups, as a consequence of being overcapitalized by the current bubble, are also over-staffing their engineering teams. You don't need a dozen developers to write a me-too photo sharing app.
I would go a little deeper and so that you just need those who are really thrilled about what they are going to create. They need to believe into what they doing. Those are the ones who make the difference.
I'm really curious about how far this game will go.
Yup, its all about credibility & trust in the business world, and in the salary disclosure world.
I believe the number because not only it it posted on HN but several people on this thread have confirmed that number.
I trust this data more then I trust the 1000+ people posting on glassdoor.com
My impression is that there is an unusually large dynamic range in the salaries of programmers, especially when looking at the middle third of the organizational hierarchy in non-technical companies. This post informs the discussion about finding compensation levels that are adequate to retain people with around 10 years of experience, who are exactly the type of people HN-ers would want making implementation level decisions.
Why is this even on HN, let alone #1?