Some of my most mediocre acquaintances have jobs at FAANG/Big N. You don't have to be exceptional to land a high comp job there, you just have to be exceptionally tolerant to BS and mindnumbingly boring work and be willing to grind interview prep.

If anything, landing a job at an unicorn is much harder cause they care about things like culture fit, enthusiasm, esoteric FotM frameworks, and entrepreneurial spirit.

Trading one anecdote for another: I've met plenty of mediocre engineers at unicorns. Every company has its own flavor of BS and "mindnumbingly boring work."

I have a friend that I consider borderline incompetent. He works for an unicorn. He claims he makes up for it in spirit in charisma.

Point is, compensation and skill don't correlate as strongly as people think.

There's a group (Dropbox, Airbnb, LinkedIN, Splunk, etc) between FAANG and Startups and this group pay really well too.

I heard Oracle OCI also pays in the 300-400k range (even for Seattle).

Yep, and that's my point: startup compensation is below market even for average, not well known companies.

Linkedin Oracle etc. are not well known companies :)?

My company isn't well known and the 200 or so engineers who work here have an average all-inclusive compensation north of $200k (many see above $225k).