FAANG Compensation Debate

It's all in the compensation.FAANG and a few fintech operations pay the big USD. The lower bound on FAANG senior software engineers is apparently above or barely overlaps the upper bound for other massively profitable companies like Intel. So you can't even achieve FAANG comp most places unless you a department director.

Tech companies like Google, Apple, etc. have a well known history in working together to suppress wages. You might be making a lot, but that doesn't mean you couldn't be making more.

This maybe true of Infosys or Wipro etc. This is not the case in FAANG companies. They get the same salaries in FAANG and are no different from regular employees. Don't let HN skew your world view. It's cool to be anti FAANG where as people posting these are living somewhere remote, salty about immigrants.

> the pay is so high because otherwise no-one would go work thereThis is a meme; every other tech company that's remotely competitive in terms of compensation pays similarly at the corresponding levels (across the entire ladder). Even if you want to rule out every single social network and ad-tech company (which is also a meme, but for the sake of argument), you've got plenty of uncontroversial options like Netflix, Roblox, Doordash, Dropbox, Square, Snowflake, etc. Also a ton

The big tech companies generally have a positive cash flow and proven products so they can still pay those big salaries.It's the startups that will have to pay less, since they can borrow less. Also if startups pay less, big tech can pay less too.Big tech is mostly a mature business now, where the decision makers dont know what to do with cash. Facebook tried the metaverse garbage and failed, Google doesnt know how to do anything (even search sucks). Microsoft seems to have more ratio

I've said that they are good means, not the best means. And I guess the reason why they are paid so little is the higher profit margins of FAANG companies as well as probably the alternative in SV that you can found a startup and make much much more if you're good (and lucky).

Do they pay within the ballpark of big tech? I imagine some of their scalability problems require the best of the best.

bigtech salaries are weird because all sides feel like they're getting away with something.bigtech looks at the marginal cost of an employee compared to marginal revenue gains they'll drive and sees a clear win. from their perspective, employees are underpaid relative to the money they bring in.employees look at a mid-six-figure TC package for a very cushy job with minimal accountability and think that they're getting away with something amazing.

Possibly. Do you think salary is the main motivation for companies? Do you think FAANG companies couldn't find 50k engineers in the US that would accept 50% pay? Of course they could, but they feel that they're getting more value by paying more.

Well, it's not only big tech that pays high salaries.