My argument isn't that it didn't take equity to get there, but that it's not intractable through "ordinary work". The big tech companies are essentially always hiring, and they're not the only ones offering marketable equity as part of the comp package. Yes, the performance of that equity can (and does) vary, but unless they're a company with Amazon's "total compensation philosophy" you benefit from the ups and the downs don't hurt too badly.

Between them FAMG employ hundreds of thousands of engineers, they're always hiring more, and within them comp in excess of $500k isn't rare (it's certainly not the median, but I suspect it's below the top quartile), hence my assertion that $200k can certainly be a stepping stone, if you're willing to put up with the BigCo open offices, reorgs, politics, etc. You seemed to be arguing that those tradeoffs aren't worth it as the $200k is very unlikely to translate into much more. I'm arguing the likelihood is higher than you were giving credit for, but perhaps we weight the concrete value of FAMG equity comp differently.

there are probably tens of millions of engineers in the world, a small percentage of whom work for FAMG. yeah, no kidding, you'll make a ton of money if you work there get equity compensation. you don't say!

Yet FAMG are always hiring.

This suggests an interesting asymmetry that could make a lot of people very wealthy. Either they don't want it, they aren't skilled enough for it, they've found another way to achieve it, they don't believe it, or our recruiting sucks.

> they've found another way to achieve it

there are literally thousands of technology companies you have never, ever, ever heard of, in the < $100 million revenue range. those are run by smart technical people who do not play nicely with others (i.e. wouldn't last an HOUR at google, even if they COULD get through the interview, which many couldn't, because FAMG interviewing process sucks), but are competent and rich.

who do you think is buying all your cloud computing services?