Most people on hacker news and most people in tech do not work for faangs. These salaries of $250,000 or $200,000 or even $150,000 seem unreachable. But these faang salaries have *.
You signup for a new Amazon job. You are a senior developer you expect to make $400,000 with the stocks/salary. Your base outside of California is 139,000 or 129,000. After year 1 only 5% vests.. after year two 15%.. the average employment length is 1.5 years. So you end up with $140,000/150,000 for working 16 hour days. If you manage to stay 10 years you could retire..(you have to because at this point you hate life) but they don't want people staying at the same level so you need to get a promotion when the 4 year vest up or you will be at your base. Getting one takes the right project and is hard and requires a breakthrough project.
Most people 95% of developers never worked at a faang and those who have, on average worked for 1.5 years. Very few are still employed or seeking faang employment. Faangs make popular entry level position but very difficult to keep for life but if you can survive many years you usually leave the field or create your own startup because of burnout. Faang adjacent companies can be the worst of all worlds same issues worse pay/upside.
You signup for a new Amazon job. You are a senior developer you expect to make $400,000 with the stocks/salary. Your base outside of California is 139,000 or 129,000. After year 1 only 5% vests.. after year two 15%.. the average employment length is 1.5 years. So you end up with $140,000/150,000 for working 16 hour days. If you manage to stay 10 years you could retire..(you have to because at this point you hate life) but they don't want people staying at the same level so you need to get a promotion when the 4 year vest up or you will be at your base. Getting one takes the right project and is hard and requires a breakthrough project.
Most people 95% of developers never worked at a faang and those who have, on average worked for 1.5 years. Very few are still employed or seeking faang employment. Faangs make popular entry level position but very difficult to keep for life but if you can survive many years you usually leave the field or create your own startup because of burnout. Faang adjacent companies can be the worst of all worlds same issues worse pay/upside.