I find in these conversations that some people are talking about salary and others are talking about salary + bonus + stock options. In particular, the stock option portion to me (but YMMV) seems disingenuous.
As an example, I'm in the Boston area and ~2 rungs away from a "director" type title, working at a company known to not pay top dollar and without things like stock. It wouldn't take much stock for me to enter into the range that's being discussed here, albeit likely the lower side of it. OTOH none of the people I talk about this stuff with are remotely near the top end of that range when you take stock options out of the picture.
Google and Facebook etc often give 'restricted stock units', ie stock that vests over time. That's almost as good as cash, since you can sell them anytime after they are vesting.
Stock in startups and options in general are a gamble, of course.
They're way better than startup-y options, definitely. However if for some reason I don't stay there long enough, it's not at all the same as cash.
They're still plenty valuable, as opposed to startup options which I consider worthless, but my point was that IMO this is one of the sources of all of these debates as to how much people make. Some people will count them and others won't
At Google you wait for a year, and then get stock vesting every month. I just treat it like monthly salary (and don't even pay too much attention to how much unvested stock I theoretically have: if I stay, they'll top it up anyway; if I leave it's gone.)
Yes, totally agree, if you want to compare numbers, you have to agree on what you compare.
In theory, we could just always talk about total compensation, and just plug in standard financial valuation models. (Those models would typically value startup equity at close to zero value---especially the kind of equity that tends to get horribly diluted.)
As an example, I'm in the Boston area and ~2 rungs away from a "director" type title, working at a company known to not pay top dollar and without things like stock. It wouldn't take much stock for me to enter into the range that's being discussed here, albeit likely the lower side of it. OTOH none of the people I talk about this stuff with are remotely near the top end of that range when you take stock options out of the picture.