Has this actually been verified? I haven't happened on any stories yet about someone "doing their time" at google to go pick a job making way above their normal range.
At this point Google is probably too large for there to be a sense of exclusivity about it. I'm sure that being one of the first 50 at Google or Amazon would be a particularly effective resume builder (though given where those companies went, perhaps a financially unnecessary one).
I've been recruited to positions specifically because of D. E. Shaw on my resume/LinkedIn profile. Whether that got me way above range or not is impossible to say, of course, but I've never been one to complain about salary in my life either. At my current company, I took a significant pay cut to come here in 2003, N years pre-IPO. N turned out to be 2.5.
