Do FAANG employees live in a bubble?
I used to be at the director level at a Fortune 50 with 300k tc and happy with life, with PhD and MBA both from top schools and 15+ yoe, and I could see people in my team with PhD from top schools making much less than myself, until I saw the tc's reported from FAANG here on Blind and could not believe my eyes. Finally I decided to go on an interview spree and got offers that doubled my TC and now I know the tc's are real.
So I have been thinking if I have been grossly underpaid in the past 15+ years or I should feel lucky that I bumped into FAANG on Blind, or which is the reality, the world outside FAANG or within FAANG. I remember the employee in my team who had a PhD from Berkeley with 30+ yoe who had tc less than a fresh graduate with an undergraduate degree here at FAANG, who had a good life and family, worked diligently on cutting edge technology, and probably happily retired now, and I concluded that the life outside FAANG is the real life, and FAANG is just a giant bubble, or distorted reality.
Another evidence is that only US enjoys this kind of high TC. In any other parts of the world, even FAANG employees do not have such high tc's.
Don't tell me you need this kind of TC to survive in bay, as I know people with 'normal' tc who had bought houses in premier neighborhoods and accumulated 5M+ net worth by saving and investing. Also don't tell me FAANG employees are better so they deserve more, as I had worked with ex-FAANG employees in my previous companies and know they are not so different from others.
So my question is how long will this bubble sustain itself?
comments
If money was a big motivator for you, then yes - you were underpaid for the 15+ years you worked outside FAANG. Also you missed the opportunity to work on challenging problems at scale.
It is not just the US that enjoys high TC. I’m from another country and I know people who negotiate every bit of their TC. Money has the same utility and value almost everywhere. It just depends on you where it lands in your list of priorities.
FAAANG is not a mandatory to make $5m+ net worth or for buying houses in premier neighbourhoods. You can do it with careful money management over a period of years. A better TC just helps you accelerate the whole process.
FAANG companies take a lot of care and effort to hire smart and talented people. They want to retain them. Paying a good salary is the easiest way to do that and they have the means to do it.
PS- I’m not a FAANG employee.
Especially with talent retention through high pay. This is something that Nvidia is just beginning to learn. They lost a bunch of good people when the stock tanked a few years ago, then started paying better raises and better comps to new hires. So the easiest way to keep people around is high TC.
In 2000s to early 2010s, bitter aftertaste of the dot com bubble burst was still fresh, and many undergrads went into fields like accounting or actuarial sciences, which were thought to be more stable and lucrative.
Facebook's IPO in 2012 and their poaching of top talent with - at the time - ridiculously high offers started a war for top talent that resulted in rocketing salaries at the top, which continues to this day. Prior to 2014, top senior engineers were lucky to make 300k+, but that has completely changed now.
And in today's winner take all world, companies making 100+ billions in revenue would be foolish not to pay up for top talent. And when you look at revenue per engineer, you can even make the argument engineers are underpaid at the top companies.