If this that were the goal, it would make a lot more sense to encourage the "SOCOM super soldiers" stay in the legit military until retirement, where they're both better supervised and paid less. That could easily be done by 1) canceling all contracts these mercenary companies, 2) banning the mercenary business, and 3) banning former soldiers from joining.

The mercenary business is a business, and if the US government doesn't have any contracts these outfits are going to hire themselves out to whoever has money, which includes doing stuff like increasing the capabilities of the US's military adversaries (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/05/04/feat...).

1) many FAANG employees either are managed out (PIP'ed) or leave to pursue more interesting work. Turnover is 10-15%.

2) Many FAANG employees aren't as smart as HN or the media would believe. Don't get me wrong, definitely some geniuses, but also a lot of fairly "normal smart" people with a work ethic

3) Walls, moats and regulatory capture are more than enough to secure the dominance of Amazon or other companies. You don't need to employee people, you can use lobbyists and lawyers.

More plausible still is the theory that managers move up by growing their orgs as rapidly as possible, not by using resources as efficiently as possible; and wages are high because these are the richest companies in the world all hiring from one constrained talent pool.

Hanlon's razor.

Of the tier guys I know... 10% go to PMCs, 20% end up in corporate security, and the rest end up working at Home Depot.

Most are burnt out enough with PTSD and failing joints that I don't know that they would make great henchmen.

This is the problem with your conspiracy theory. I work for a FAANG, and maybe about 1/3rd of the people who quit end up leaving to start or join a startup. Paying them tons of money gives them the exact resources to go off and start that competitor.

when i look at the 500,000 Galaxy Brain coders working at GoogaAppaFaceSoftZon, i hear a giant sucking sound from the open source ecosystem.

if only 10% of tech talent leave before 5 years, that is still a lot fewer Ronin wandering out there who might eventually threaten the Shogun.

Why pay huge amounts of money for something you can get for free? As a FANG, your start-up potential competitors will overwhelmingly fail on their own, or at least fail to grow into a significant competitor. No need to pay massive amounts of money to keep them from forming in the first place.

Also, I think FANG-type companies see more of a benefit from startups than competition. Startups give them a chance to see what new ideas seem promising. When they see one with promising tech, they can acquire or copy.