We are talking about the bay area. No one – IBM, Cisco, Apple, Oracle, HP, Novell, Intel, Motorola, 3Com, Yahoo or any of the other big industry players that employed software engineers – paid anywhere near the salary and benefits of Google.

When I chose to return to Genentech I had an offer from Apple and it certainly met or exceeeded everything in my previous Google offers. This is consistent with my read on other employers like Facebook and Microsoft.