I think the best, non-hearsay source for this is anonymous data at glassdoor.com. Google has quite a lot of data there as well (over 500 reports from San Jose/Mountain View).
And many people feel it's in their interests to lie regarding salaries. How can you even be sure the people who are reporting some salary figure on glassdoor.com even ever had the job they claimed to have had, never mind reported an accurate salary?
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Software-Engineer-San...
533 Salaries - Mean is 107,174, with a range of [70, 133]. Median is about 100K.
Bonuses are underreported in comparison. But of 24 reports, the bonus is 18K on average.
This includes experienced engineers as well. So I think the original link's claim of 100K starting salary is probably an over-estimate.