[tstrimple]

> People who work at FAANGs will often make more money and do less work than the foreign contractors in places like Poland and Ukraine getting paid $35k a year for the same work.

The reality is, it's almost never the same work.

[__loam]

Not sure what this means. Obviously we're comparing apples and oranges between different projects, but it's weird to suggest that foreign contractors aren't doing the same work as domestic employees. I'm pretty sure FAANG does use foreign contractors too, so they are often doing literally the same work.

[mathteddybear]

These are product-oriented tech companies, while the contracting pertains to e.g. custom software development.

What follows is that these companies have enough revenue to afford FAANG salaries. And FAANG employees in foreign countries have their salaries computed by HR spreadsheets, with the goal of making a family-oriented employee quality of life on par in every country. According to levels.fyi, in Poland Google pays $96.7k to SWE L4. Sure, those salaries were often set when the particular office location was created, and inflation happened since, unevenly. So you might find even higher reported salary from tech companies that opened their Warsaw office somewhat recent.

So, even the entry level SWE earn more than custom software contractors. Beyond that, there's more. With their skillset, 10x employees could leave and form start-ups. To prevent that, the FAANG have a career ladder that make 10x employees earn 10x more every 10 years. Provided they jump the promo hoops.

Again, the tech companies afford that, because their revenue comes from tech products

That isn't to say that as an SWE in these companies you couldn't work on a CRUD database project for some internal website. Perhaps you can get promoted doing that, even though it has more in common with custom software development.