Also throwaway for obvious reasons. What you say sounds totally in line with my experience:

I am Senior SWE at an Alphabet company. Came to MTV in middle of 2015 from a company in the midwest where I made over $200K last year (much of this was profit-sharing bonus), and I was definitely at top of the market for my city.

My total compensation for this coming year (based on current value of GOOG, obviously this can vary) is projected in the mid-$300Ks. (Some of this is initial GSUs vesting, so it's slightly inflated). With the difference in cost-of-living it should be about equivalent to where I was last year. Too soon for first refresh grant, so I can't speculate about where it may go from there.

I've already gotten a larger raise and bonus than I expected, seeing as I negotiated a better offer than they originally gave me. My manager has been talking with me about what I need to do to get to promoted Staff level.

So yes, there is money to be made in SV, at big companies.

One more datapoint from Google (non-Bay Area office):

$75k (partial year), $182k, $254k, $360k

and then I left for a start-up where my total package is $50k. No less happy :-)

That is because you have shitloads of cash.

what part of the stack did/do you work on (machine learning/AI, infra, web services/APIs, frontend, other)?

When you say unexercised you mean unvested, right? Can you redo the numbers and break-out the vesting stock?

Also, since the thread is about making decisions about your career, considering compensation, why did you leave Google?

By unexercised I mean unexercised. Stock options vest continually (well, usually monthly or quarterly usually, after the 1-year cliff); when they've vested, you have the right to exercise them, and they're considered your property. You only exercise them when you choose to, and it's at that point that you're taxed on the difference between the current stock price and the strike price.

Many of my coworkers would auto-exercise-and-sell their options immediately as they vested. If I'd done this then it would've added between $15K-$60K for each of the first 5 years, but the last year would've been about $130K instead of $350K (I benefitted significantly from the stock price appreciation of GOOG, even if I did screw up nearly everything tax-related).

I left Google because five things happened within a year or so: #1 I started feeling bored at work #2 My existing project ended and I couldn't find one that really excited me #3 I passed a million bucks in liquid net worth #4 The outside tech world started entering what seems to be a period of high uncertainty and #5 I started thinking seriously about marriage & kids and realized I only had a few years left. So, in the spirit of YOLO and with immediate financial concerns taken care of, I figured it was time to do some things I'd always wanted to do.

> I figured it was time to do some things I'd always wanted to do.

Does that mean you decided to do the startup thing or that you decided to take time off?

Startup thing.

does it vary by what part of the stack you work on? The impression I've got is that Google tends to value infrastructure engineers more than others (like frontend engineers).

Not to my knowledge. I started in frontend but had touched every part of the stack (including infrastructure and some ML) by the time I left.