Not to say that individual engineers can make large impacts at that scale, cause hell a million for a do change seems large. That being said, you were on a team of 3 that drove 100 million in revenue, so you didn't have that large an impact as a single engineer, and your other example was something that was assumed based on 8 year old data, and the impact didn't exist when actual measurements were taken.

I'm still having a hard time believing that a single person created 100 million in value for Google for a product that isn't currently being sold. It seems more like a result of a price war for self driving car talent as companies are scrambling to try and take the whole self driving car market before anyone else

These things are related. You don't get a price war over someone that results in paying them $100m if you don't believe that person will create over $100m in value.

And since this person went off, started their own company, and sold it a couple years later for $1 Billion, it seems whoever was offering that paycheck was right to do so.

That's the thought process behind investing, but just because the investment risk was taken doesn't mean they actually created that value. Also with strategic investments sometimes it isn't that your investment generates that much revenue for you, but ithe does deny your competition access to that resource

Well, keep in mind that we also don't know the timescale this was over. If it was $120mm in a year, then that's perhaps crazy, but 120 million over 5 or ten years?

With 80 billion in revenue and ~75K employees according to a google search, that means that there's an expectation that an average hire will drive $1 million in revenue per year. To be paid 120M/year you'd need to drive significantly more than that, but to be paid 20M/year, that's now someone who is 50x the average employee, not 200x the average employee, and that's reasonable. I think we all know an engineer or two who is extraordinary.

I know engineers that did that.

so:

when you're earning $1 it's not hard to double your money when you're earning $1 billion it's hard to double your money but when you're earning $1 billion it's a lot easier to earn an extra million or two.