I brought up the 7% raise thing to a friend, apparently Google's solution (not sure if this took place earlier though) was to change their 4 year vesting schedule to a 3 year one. This basically acts like a raise.
So many compensation discussions are hard to get into because of the reliance on adding (sold or unsold) stock as part of total compensation. It's very reasonable for a junior engineer to get a $125-$150k base salary offer these days, but whether their total comp after 1 year pushes that to $300k, let alone if they can get a promotion that adds significantly more stock to push total to $500k the next (noting their first stock is still vesting and contributing), depends so much on the particulars of the company's stock price set by the market and stock grant plans that unless you name names and package specifics people won't believe you. Like it's possible as you say that you get promoted but with no new stock and a paltry raise, yet nevertheless your total comp over the next year goes up to $500k, this can be entirely due to the stock raising. Not very useful in a discussion trying to get at actual salary trajectories that don't depend on market luck.
The job I quit last year (Salesforce, fortune 137) I reached the "Lead" position (roughly equivalent to L5/senior at a place like google, but "Staff" at other places, titles are dumb) but I only ever had two stock grants in the years I was there: one at the beginning, one after reaching "Lead", and the second one was almost insultingly tiny (much smaller than the initial one) and I wasn't phased at all to give up ~70% of it in leaving. So for all my years there my comp was basically dominated by the base salary + the annual % bonus nearly everyone always gets and peaked at a "mere" $200k, stock didn't impact it much. A random mid-stage startup in Utah of all places trying to recruit me was throwing out $200k base as comparison. This sort of experience, especially the lack of significant stock refreshes ever, is pretty common, but there are companies (like Facebook) that give significant annual refreshes not even tied to promotions and can make stories like the GP's not too crazy.
A final factor in making these discussions difficult is that there are a lot of senior+ folks who've stayed with a place for 4+ years and are essentially getting shafted in terms of their earning potential and they don't want to admit that they need to change jobs (or even just leave and come back later) to get a lot more than they currently do, which leads them to dismiss very real likelihoods of newly hired junior or "standard" roles (what do we even call just a plain "software engineer" when so many are either junior or senior) getting as much as they do after stocks are added in.
Yup, and nope (I wasn't at the HQ office in SF but the Bellevue office, formerly Seattle). Look at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Salesforce/salaries/Software-... (I never added mine there; Glassdoor is also useful https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Salesforce-LMTS-Software-En...) and pay special attention to years-at-company. I'd get more if I returned, at least $300k, but... What was amusing is that the next tier, "Principal", has many employees at it where even if they're at HQ they were making less than me as a Lead (and some Seniors). (And it's still the case for levels data judging by the distribution if not the exact numbers.) The next level after that, "Architect", is where significant stock grants actually start happening at that company, but it's rather more work to get there and as far as my interests go not really desirable since almost always it meant you stopped coding in any meaningful way.
When people talk about salaries, I feel they always just talk about SF.
I was an SMTS at Salesforce (also not HQ) back in the day on $150k~ total comp, which people in this thread regard as junior pay; and that was on my initial stock grant, never got to find out what my refresher would have been.
So many compensation discussions are hard to get into because of the reliance on adding (sold or unsold) stock as part of total compensation. It's very reasonable for a junior engineer to get a $125-$150k base salary offer these days, but whether their total comp after 1 year pushes that to $300k, let alone if they can get a promotion that adds significantly more stock to push total to $500k the next (noting their first stock is still vesting and contributing), depends so much on the particulars of the company's stock price set by the market and stock grant plans that unless you name names and package specifics people won't believe you. Like it's possible as you say that you get promoted but with no new stock and a paltry raise, yet nevertheless your total comp over the next year goes up to $500k, this can be entirely due to the stock raising. Not very useful in a discussion trying to get at actual salary trajectories that don't depend on market luck.
The job I quit last year (Salesforce, fortune 137) I reached the "Lead" position (roughly equivalent to L5/senior at a place like google, but "Staff" at other places, titles are dumb) but I only ever had two stock grants in the years I was there: one at the beginning, one after reaching "Lead", and the second one was almost insultingly tiny (much smaller than the initial one) and I wasn't phased at all to give up ~70% of it in leaving. So for all my years there my comp was basically dominated by the base salary + the annual % bonus nearly everyone always gets and peaked at a "mere" $200k, stock didn't impact it much. A random mid-stage startup in Utah of all places trying to recruit me was throwing out $200k base as comparison. This sort of experience, especially the lack of significant stock refreshes ever, is pretty common, but there are companies (like Facebook) that give significant annual refreshes not even tied to promotions and can make stories like the GP's not too crazy.
A final factor in making these discussions difficult is that there are a lot of senior+ folks who've stayed with a place for 4+ years and are essentially getting shafted in terms of their earning potential and they don't want to admit that they need to change jobs (or even just leave and come back later) to get a lot more than they currently do, which leads them to dismiss very real likelihoods of newly hired junior or "standard" roles (what do we even call just a plain "software engineer" when so many are either junior or senior) getting as much as they do after stocks are added in.