Is google just particularly dogged about salary negotiations, then? The numbers I've seen for someone new to the org don't impress me relative to the competitive baseline. Maybe you have to ask way higher, or you have to come in at a high level already?

Where do you see significantly better salaries? You might be ignoring the stock compensation which is basically like cash for an established stable company like Google

This is actually a common complaint on Blind (anonymous social networking site).

Google seems to consistently low ball relative to other companies (Facebook, Apple, uber, etc.)

Obviously depends on the team/role but seems like google is trying to leverage its “prestigious brand” to pay less

exactly this.

He's right that Google doesn't generally pay competitively, but wrong in comparing to smaller startups. It's some of the larger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, AirBnB, etc.) that Google tends to fall short of.

Interesting, I don't have that impression. levels.fyi doesn't show much disparity, for example. Where do you get this from?

They have a tendency to down-level a lot, which won't show up on levels.fyi (though if you look at the leveling by years of experience it might be extractable).

Also, from what I understand they tend to lowball much more aggressively than other top companies if you don't have any strong competing offers. Levels.fyi submitters will of course be the kinds of people who tend to shop around and get competing offers.