My programmer friends at hedge funds (all between 22 and 26) are averaging 500K salary with 100K bonuses (note: as a programmer, base is much higher but bonus is lower). So if google isn't paying those types of numbers to people, then money cannot be the only factor at play.
To add a generalization, my rule of thumb is the variable part of compensation varies most for the domain experts. So in technology for the sake of technology style companies like Google, total comp shoots up based on stock/bonuses. In reality, Google is an advertising company so presumably the ad sales folks bringing in whales aren't hurting either. Naturally numbers get skewed by overpaying to keep certain people (i.e. overshoot on retention packages), and given large scale, there are always some overpaid due to lucky timing/placing. Such is life! In hedge funds, the traders get the big bonuses, but the programmers get a solid salary so lower bonuses don't hurt quite so much. Luck also plays a part for those folks var comp. For those in hft, I'm aware of a few places where given the right mix of skills, someone who likes to think of themselves as a programmer can get the trader style bonuses.
[1] i don't mean that in a dismissive sense - i work there and it's the best job i've ever had, but the work is not qualitatively different from what you'd do in other software-focused companies. hedge funds are not software-focused.
Many people, even at Google, will be writing coding that isn't The Product. Having spoken to people at such firms, and their competitors, there are plenty of dev jobs there that sound boring as all hell, alongside the fun ones.
Pushing money around does sound boring, just like "pushing web pages around" or "pushing 140 char messages around". yawn ;-) In the last 12 months I've worked on custom languages/compilers, custom databases, kernel hacking, oddball processors, little visualization hacks, and have a giant stack of as yet unreleased hardware piled up to experiment with. I get to program against millions of events per second with minimal latency, giant result data sets for batch work, and points on the spectrum in between. The data itself is finance related and it's fun to munge and experiment with trading algorithms on it.
So far I have, over time, swung between product companies and trading companies. Fun to be had on both sides, among many other places. Actually, one of the more surprising things I've learned over time is how little most programmers realize about the variety of fun things out there. And how conservative and fad following most programmers are, funnily enough.
I'm not naive about that - large companies have their own agendas. But someone working at a silicon valley firm still has a better chance of doing something meaningful than someone working at a hedge fund where the answer is pretty much "no" by the nature of the business.
Is it "meaningful" to spend my days figuring out ways to get more people to click on more adverts? Not really. Build a social network for dogs' left testicles? Not really. Squeeze another dollar out of the equity markets? Not really. Build a faster database? Build a web analytics tool so people can squeeze out a few more conversions? Take a few cycles out of a market data feed handler to lower latency for a trading algorithm? No, no, and nope.
Are there good side effects from the above? Sure, we can come up with examples. For finance, you can take a look at the tightening of spreads (e.g. hft tends to make spreads go to their minimum making trades cheaper for everyone). Or adding liquidity in regular conditions so when someone small like a retail user comes along to sell some stock they get a good price quickly (not always of course, I mean really, you expect smart teams to take obviously dumb trades in an illiquid market?). Or more rapid price discovery (i.e. if something is mispriced it tends to get arb'ed away pretty rapidly, so that is faster info dissemination).
Can it be fun? Sure. Is it more good for the world than bad? Yup, I think so. Is it /meaningful/? Is it bollocks.
None of the above is meaningful compared to other things in my life. Important things like my family and trying to leave the world a better place than I found it (e.g. I give to charity -- probably more than most will ever earn).
That, and I'm with Vonnegut. "We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different.".
tl;dr no more or less than other silicon valley jobs I've had, but then again, I don't expect it to compare to the important stuff in life.
To be a quantdev or quant, an MFE is far more useful than an MBA.