Often times it feels as if grass is greener on the other side of the fence, most times it is not true. I left Juniper a year ago and say with 100% confidence that in case of Juniper grass is definitely greener on the other side of the fence. I was literally shocker as to much money companies throw at you, it is then that I realized that Juniper pay is nowhere compared to other companies. I am not smart enough to crack top tier company interviews. I joined a tier 2 company and even that company was able to pay significantly more than Juniper (more base, more bonus and significantly more RSUs).
Juniper is an excellent company for slackers. For good engineers, the company simply does not provide competitive compensation. The kind of inefficiency that we have in Junos sw development groups is appalling. Juniper should get rid of incompetent employees (including bad managers), so that they have enough budget for reward the remaining capable employees.
In other good companies, most employees are good, slackers like we see in Juniper are rare. I think this is the reason why they can afford to pay more. They simply can do more work with less engineers.