These FAANG salaries mystify me. Here I am, in the mid-west, working for a manufacturing company, as a programmer/sysadmin/devop in an engineering department, with 25 years of experience, making almost the top end of what's possible for a non-managerial role, and my salary is NOTHING like that. I just worked with 2 of the world's leading experts in my field -- they literally wrote and created systems to implement the government spec which governs most of our work -- and learned that their salaries -- while staggering in this industry -- weren't even half of this. Sometimes I look at this disparity, and want to take a crack at switching industries, but, frankly, it's intimidating. I guess it's 25 years of conditioning. In old-school manufacturing companies, $400K is VP-level pay. There's probably only a couple dozen people making that at my 30K-employee company. And here you are telling me that it's just a "standard rate" for a devop with 10 years of experience. The difference in worlds is hard to wrap my head around.
Same deal here. 400k, hell even 200k to me would seem like "I've made it", and that's just accepted as normal for others? Also, been doing IT way longer than 10 years.
The main difference in my observation between FAANG and the rest is the growth rate, profit margin, and preference for equity compensation. When starting at a FAANG you'll often receive a high but not outrageous compensation package with equity making up 20-30% of compensation. 4 years later the equity will often have compounded by 20-40% annually yielding the TC packages you see today.
In another industry with stock that appreciates slowly or depreciates over time, the model wouldn't yield the same packages. The company buys your equity grant when you start, and has limited incentive to renegotiate/fight over the outsized reward.
