The point is that those few thousand represent outliers. How many engineers work in the Valley or in the US? 400K puts you in the vaunted top 1% for the entire country.
Nope. 400K would make you an at least one, maybe two standard deviation outlier. Get a grip! Sure, these salaries probably exist, but they are super rare. Every HN salary thread, these people crawl out of the woodwork to tell you that their brother's girlfriend's cousin's roommate makes $400K at Google, so therefore that's a "normal tech salary". It's a legendary HN trope at this point. These people are quoting outlier salaries at outlier companies.
If you want some numbers with actual sources, the median software engineer salary for a software engineer in the bay area is around $110-125K, according to Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2]. You can argue about their methodology, but it's better than the usual "anecdote = average" logic that these HN salary experts employ. Even if equity added an additional 100% of salary (which I have never seen in my life) we're not even close to these oft-quoted $400K figures.
To you guys outside of SF. When you hear people throwing around these anonymously sourced salary figures you need to take them with an enormous grain of salt. These figures are fantasy land.
I don't know what to say, except that if you're relying on Glassdoor as an indication of L5 compensation at Google, you're making decisions based on bad information. And, yes, equity can be 50% or more of TC at those levels, which have salaries well above 110k.
If there's someone reading this who's interested in working at Google or Facebook but worry the compensation might be too low to live a good lifestyle in the Bay Area, ask actual people who work there for input instead of people who gawk in disbelief at these salaries.
No you won't.