Sadly outside of FAANG this is not the case at all. Total compensation out of non-faang is: Salary + worthless stock option and maybe a 3% 401k match if they're more than 5 years old.
I'm not sure I can believe that. The companies who hire for average senior engineers like me do not compete with FAANG. They hire the 90% of us who aren't rockstars and have accepted we have no upward mobility in our careers.
I know very many devops/software engineers in San Francisco making $140k-$150k total comp.
Sure, the vast majority do. But to say that only a small handful of companies pay this is just untrue... it's probably in the high double or even triple digits. Many namebrand non-FAANG (ie. Linked-In, Uber, Snap, Slack) do, and some you might not even think of. One example - OpenDoor, which pays over $400k for a regular senior engineer.
Additionally, it's not uncommon for small NYC fintechs to pay straight cash comp of $350k+ for basic senior fullstack devs.
All these places do the standard FAANG type interviews though. They're all competing for the same talent pool, and typically they're full of ex-FAANG engineers.
I think you might slightly underestimate the sheer # of companies and tech jobs in the Bay Area? I think Hacker News is an echo chamber when it comes to this because there are so many "rockstar" type engineers here.
Not arguing that 95% of companies don't. Just saying there are many outside the base FAANG camp that do... it's a much bigger ecosystem than one might expect at first blush. If you hang out on blind or get contacted by these companies over time it becomes evident.
Probably. But there is worldwide demand for good developers, try looking into remote work. I've spoken with many people who have more than one "job", which amount to long, but not insane work weeks.
One thing I think a lot of people underestimate is the sheer amount of _clueless_ (or almost clueless) software developers out there. There are a lot of young people with good intentions but very, very little "real" experience (writing a React web app for a class assignment isn't "real" except for saying you've tried the framework). Work experience is quite different from CompSci knowledge, evne if both are important! If you have even just 3-5 years of real experience building real systems with real failures and real successes, you should be quite easily employed elsewhere if your current job doesn't meet your expectations.
Keep this in mind: we don't let surgeons operate alone before they have 5-6-7 years of _post-doctoral_ education and training. If you have the battle scars and experience to get a project done properly, you should be fine.
I have never worked at FAANG and had no problem making 200k+ at several companies doing webdev, sysadmin, and security over the last decade. Same for most of my friends.
Now I do independent consulting so I get to set my own pay and < 40 hours which is worth more to me than maximal income, but if you want to make 500k+ a year you totally can without working adtech or FAANG especially if you are independent with niche skillsets.
@lrvick My challenge with trying to leave my dayjob to do indie consulting has been finding my first, steady clients...at least enough to swap out for my dayjob. I have tried it the last few years as a side hustle, and while my tech and biz/ops skills are pretty good...my sales skills are not. Would you be willing to share how you got your clients, at least to the point of being able to live off of only your consulting work? (My email address is in my profile, if you wish to share less publicly.)