Oh dude, Levels is so out of date! Don't actually use it for serious negotiation. Levels systemically removes "outlier" offers, and people with good offers don't post until they leave 2 years later. So there's a huge lagging+dampening factor when you use Levels. It should be more of a "minimum offer" calibration.
$500k for senior (L5) is kind of the expected offer these days. If you are interviewing at FAANG you are doing a huge disservice by using Levels and settling for $300k when you can pretty easily get $500k.
I joined a FAANG a couple years ago at $550k TC or so at 4 YoE for senior. It's grown to about $950k due to stock growth. I'm not sure what you mean by "I can't touch the money for a few years," I get a portion of it every few months.
Refreshers at meets are typically 25% of the "standard" grant (so your comp will go down after 4 years unless you have outstanding performance or your director gives you an Additional Equity grant)
Vesting cadence is typically quarterly or monthly.
Most people don't join with the "standard" grant, they negotiate it up quite significantly.
Refreshers only being you up to the "standard" target TC (as defined by the company). So after their initial grant fully vests, most engineers will see their comp drop by a couple hundred k, even with refreshers.
This is a huge contributing factor to the low retention at big tech - it's why most people leave by the time their initial grant runs out.
$500k for senior (L5) is kind of the expected offer these days. If you are interviewing at FAANG you are doing a huge disservice by using Levels and settling for $300k when you can pretty easily get $500k.
I joined a FAANG a couple years ago at $550k TC or so at 4 YoE for senior. It's grown to about $950k due to stock growth. I'm not sure what you mean by "I can't touch the money for a few years," I get a portion of it every few months.