A better pick for “non prestigious but good company “ might be Khan Academy, which has an amazing service with great engineers but as far as I know doesn’t make or pay a ton.
Khan Academy is sought after in the cs student community as well. although won't be first choice for many.
Facebook has a quarter of the worlds population active on it.
Google has most of the search and is responsible for Android, which is the most popular mobile OS in the world.
Amazon broad cloud computing mainstream and now controls a huge chunk of the world compute because of it.
Apple effectively defined the smartphone era.
Netflix is like 60% of all of the Internet traffic and made legitimate streaming a thing.
Stripe... is an easier to use PayPal?
It is less mainstream so exclusivity increases the demand factor.
Amazon's work culture is not very positively seen. Facebook's product is often seen negatively upon although not that much. Google is seen positively.
Some of it is tied into recruiting as well. Apple has a very opaque intern and new grad recruiting process. Netflix simply doesn't hire SWE interns and newgrads.
For Stripe, Presumed High caliber engineering colleagues (party due to size and growth), especially because there is a lot of hype for Stripe and its documentation and process among tech professionals.
High potential for stocks rising at IPO, like Snowflake (although there seems to a value cap) so kids are not as excited about it as Databricks.
Also wondering, why?
A 2.6+% merchant fee payment processor?
High potential for stocks rising at IPO, like Snowflake (although there seems to a value cap) so kids are not as excited about it as Databricks.
Pshh what? You work at FANG and think this?
But generally I think the OP is correct: working for FAANG has made many, many people far more money over the past decade than they would have otherwise made on average in a startup.
I suspect that eventually the tide will turn, as it always does. The companies will get middle-manager bloat, MBAs and accountants start pinching pennies, systems get dragged down in technical debt, and more nimble competitors eventually outcompete. But we're not there yet.
furthermore before they were fang companies, google was the top tier startup and IBM was the equivalent to FANG.
WeWork and Airbnb want a word.
A word about what? Their salaries are certainly competitive with, if not higher paying than, Google and Stripe's are objectively higher.
People would rather work at FAANG than Stripe because FAANG will get you a lot more pay and connections. And people know that, so they will value people from FAANG for it. But it comes from the root fact that FAANG makes a ton of net income per employee, same as some finance/consulting firms, and that net income is more attributable to you specifically, rather than say someone at General Mills.