Google and Microsoft are in the same ballpark of profitability per employee as say Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. The difference is that financial firms take pride in how much they pay their employees, while tech firms do things like collude to depress employee wages.

This couldn't be more true. I got an offer at Intel after working there for the summer. A finance company asked what they were paying and decimated Intel's offer. Upon telling Intel the recruiter at Intel demanded to know where I was going. Luckily I wasn't going to Apple, Adobe (or one of the other companies they allegedly had illegal no competes with or I would have no job at all.

'decimated', as in, paying you ten times less?

If you are going to pull out a dictionary, make sure to read both definitions. :)

decimated:

past participle, past tense of dec·i·mate (Verb) Verb

1) Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of.

2) Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

Even under definition 2, it still means 'reduce'. So if the salary was 'reduced', the second offer was less than the first one. It may have 'decimated the attractiveness' of the first salary, sure.

Please tell me you are trolling:

Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

decimated Intel's offer.

Drastically reduce the effectiveness of Intel's offer.

It fits exactly. Not only that, but you could also say:

Destroyed Intel's offer. (Def 1)

Decimate is the right word choice and it conveyed the intensity of how badly Finance Co. beat Intel's offer. Your definition of decimate may be used by heavy quants but it doesn't fit everyday usage.

Sure, just like December is the tenth month of the year.

Actually, it was: http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/month_names.html .

Nine tenths as much to be correct. From wiki: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth". A cohort selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades.

Ah yes, my favorite pet peeve - descriptivism vs prescriptivism in linguistics. Lives have been wasted arguing about this exact interpretation of decimate, my position is that 'decimate' in a 2013, Western context means one of the definitions posted above - i.e., significantly reduce in number, not by 10%.

So what was the offer like? 2x Intel?

You are not wrong about the amount of money to be made in the finance industry, but when talking about those salaries you have to be very careful.

Hedge fund managers make orders of magnitude more money than their employees. Investment banks work much like law firms, if you are a partner or partner track you can make tons, but frequently that is built on the back of average paid employees.

What would tech company compensation look like if we included Brin/Cook/Zuckerberg?

There are lots and lots of small shops out there that have good but not idiotic compensation packages. The tech companies could (should?) match them if it weren't an ingrained part of the culture not to.

Well, total compensation, say at Google, can be around 200k for senior guys. A lot of people in finance are making less than that and so people do leave for software jobs.

As I have said before, really huge compensation levels in finance exist for VP-level people. Please keep in mind that "VP" in finance means something like "pretty senior", he might no be a manager at all. These guys have around 5 years experience and if all went well for them they can be making around 300k. These would be hard to match en masse while avoiding a situation when of two engineers doing the same job one is paid X and another 2X.

I don't think any of our tech guys ever earned $360k. That's for the traders.