That number is too high. If you restrict to the FAANG companies, though, it is only a small overestimate. See https://www.levels.fyi/ and select Google. There an L5 represents an "experienced" engineer with at least 4-5 years of experience, and total comp is $350k. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft are similar.
Yeah $400K is high L5. Not uncommon, but slightly above average. It's possible that if you average all engineers you'd get something close to $400K, but L3 and L4 salaries would bring that value down. In surveys L5 makes up the majority of the engineering workforce in these companies, and L3\L4 have a bigger representation than L6+, so it's unlikely that the average TC is $400K.
Probably also worth highlighting that L5 at google is a much wider range than other companies. For example, at Uber, there's two separate promotion tiers (5A and 5B, with the latter being far less common than the former) that more or less overlap w/ Google's L5 range, while at Microsoft, google's L5 range would overlap with a good portion of 3 separate tiers (senior SDE to principal SDE)[0]
Yea, whenever you read these insane compensations, people forget to point out that we're talking about a small outlier of senior engineers at a small outlier of companies, in a handful of cities in the USA. This bimodal distribution of a (relatively) few insane comps bring the average way above the median.
