[time_to_smile]

I find this is true for me, but I ultimately don't work for a FAANG because the money isn't that important to me and there are many things about FAANG companies I don't like. However I don't think this generalizes well for people who do aggressively pursue careers at FAANG companies.

My experience has been that most of the people I know that work for FAANG are extremely TC conscious, that's a large part of why they work at a FAANG in the first place and the source of a non-trivial amount of their self worth. If you look around the comments on Blind (a biased source for sure, but certainly a non-zero part of the community) you'll find plenty of people where TC is all that matters.

I interviewed at FB a few years ago and one thing that surprised me when I asked "what's your favorite thing about working here?" I got the same answer from everyone I talked to: the compensation/benefits. I thought for sure the answers would involve working on hard problems at scale, having incredible amounts of data etc. However without fail every interviewer immediately pointed out their comp and other perks as their primary motivator for working there.

In general I would say that people that make a lot of money, make a lot of money because making a lot of money is important to them.