I think that's about right, and the "mess" isn't just code, but organizational. You might be hired to maintain some simple widget, and then 1–2 years later be writing a large scale job processing service, or designing a new front-end rendering system, or any other number of high-impact, challenging projects. Theoretically, these could be different sets of people (like techs vs engineers or something), but since companies are constantly re-orging and don't know what they need, it's the same people doing both.

I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.

My theory is FANGS pay more because it's a casino like setup.

Yes, their employees are making lot of money but where her money ends up going? A large part of that ends up paying rent in a region where there are many others making similar wages like you, and trying to outcompete you out of the best property you can choose to live.

Mostly people at headquarters or major offices get paid large salaries.

Executives make decisions where to open office, they've upphand on the info and have access to money, they buy the land in and around the region where office will be setup, where their employees will want to live.

That way half the money they pay ends right back into pocket of executives while FANG employees have statisfaction of making highest engineering wages.

It doesn't matter how much you make, if you still find yourself doing the same thing you were doing 5 years ago, perhaps, all that money didn't bring you much.

Now, there are exceptions to this where people saved up their salary and launched another business into huge success, yea those benefit the most. But most of the FANG employees will find themselves doing similar job after 5 years, so...

How exactly that extra money has changed your life? Are you driving Buggati or Bentley to your office? Do you have celebrities (male/female -depending on your orientation) caressing your hair while you hack on the code? Did you start a school to teach underprivileged kids?

As we can see most of these luxuries are still not available to majority FAANG employees regardless of how much they make. It's the money on paper, it doesn't buy much power. To have real power in society, having more money than your peers is not necessary - what you need is vastly more money and influence over other people.

I mean, FAANG compensation lets you trivially retire (or achieve financial independence) by ~40 (if you're single), and that's assuming you're budgeting for 200k/year with an extremely conservative withdrawal rate (3%). If you're willing to resettle somewhere cheaper and live a somewhat less extravagant lifestyle, you could do it by your early 30s no problem.

And, again, this is if you're single, i.e. no second income, paying a single-filer's tax rate, and no benefit of cheaper housing by having someone to split the expense with, etc. A partner earning any real amount of money speeds this up dramatically. (Kids do cost money, if you have them, but they don't cost enough money to offset having a second SWE income, even if you pay for extremely expensive daycare, unless you have like five.)

I don't know about you, but having "fuck you" money after a decade in the workforce, or "no, really, fuck you" money after 2 decades is a pretty good deal. It is, in fact, much easier to make this happen working at a FAANG (or comparable) than elsewhere. People like to complain about the cost of living, and yes, those complaints are valid, but working at a FAANG it's entirely possible to save more after taxes and expenses than software engineers in other parts of the country make _before_ taxes; trying to equivocate between those situations is really quite silly. The first is in a dramatically better financial position than the second.

I imagine this is true in theory. The math checks out. But every FAANG company has been around for at least 15 years now and we don't hear many stories of their early hires retiring. Where does it break down in practise? Is it just too hard to give up the high paying role? Is it that retirees don't talk about it? Or is it that the theory is actually wrong for some reason, and working for $200k for 20 years doesn't actually leave you with fuck you money after all?

Divorces are ridiculously expensive. That was the major culprit for my generation. Only one peer of mine has actually retired before 50 (that I know of), and he stayed married. Everyone else ended up splitting up, which wiped all their savings. Or they went another path.

I followed the other path - total mental breakdown, severe depression followed by "non-retirement" - working freelance, as a co-founder and in interesting jobs while travelling. Turns out that being a well-paid employee for years and years isn't something I can actually do without getting depressed about it.

Both the divorce rates and the divorce cost are thanks to the divorce industry and the divorce lobby. We have a massive industry set up to encourage and profit from divorce.

Most countries don't have this problem, but it's a bigger problem than even the US' ballooning medical costs.

I'm not American :) The UK and Australia both have this problem.

I think it's less to do with the actual costs of the divorce, and more about converting one household into two. All the equity in the house gets split up, which usually gives a decent deposit for another house for each partner, but nowhere near enough to pay off the whole mortgage. Each partner needs enough rooms to host the kids during their shared custody, so a family of 4 goes from needing a single 3-bed house to needing two 3-bed houses. They need two cars, instead of being able to survive on one. If one of the partners gave up their career for the kids then there's alimony to pay. And so on. The legal bills are like icing on the cake.

Luckily I observe this from the perspective of having a happy marriage, which happens to be incredibly frugal compared to two single people living alone. A house for two people who enjoy being together does not need to be larger than a house for one person; although you need a larger house when you have kids. Of many objects you only need one piece, because you are not using them all the time. Cooking is cheap; it requires time, but if you spend that time talking, you don't really mind. Minus those expenses you had in the past simply because you felt alone or bored.

The expenses of two people living together are almost the same as of one person living alone. The extra expenses are mostly for the kids (including the mortgage for the larger house). Which means that if one person has a good salary, the other can "early retire" immediately. Or if both have good salaries, they can save half of the income, and perhaps retire as soon as the kids become independent.

A divorce throws all of this out of the window.

More and more countries are having this problem as women get emancipated and make more money.

Few people want to be completely beholden to the whims of another person for their entire lives.

I'm not arguing that people don't divorce for bad reasons, but there's also a solid reason why divorce is a good idea in many cases.

I'm not going to argue for or against divorces.

I will argue against a system where there is a lobby designed to glorify and encourage divorce and stoke marital conflict, followed by a litigation which costs around $200k between both sides to bring to completion, which ends when one side or the other runs out of money.

At that point, in most cases, the custody and financial arrangement is designed to be ridiculously complex and inequitable.

High divorce rates are quite common in developed country, but high cost may depend on countries I supposed.

I do hear many stories. On Twitter, on FIRE forums, some from friends. It's just that the kind of person to do this doesn't tend to be very outspoken.

My impression is that there is no breakdown, people who want to retire do retire, but people who want to retire is minority.

I'd wager hedonistic adaptation is the big culprit. You don't end up saving that much unless you actually plan for achieving financial independence.

Maybe the retirees feel less pressure to talk about themselves on blogs/twitter, since they are retired they don't have to try and stay relavent and instead can just enjoy life.

Sorry, when I said 200k, I meant withdrawing & spending 200k/year, not earning 200k/year. In today's environment you're more likely to be earning (at least) 400k/year by the time you retire if you're following that playbook.

If you take a pretty standard estimate of career and comp growth for an engineer that joined a FAANG company as a new grad and stuck around, generally speaking they'd get promoted to senior-equivalent within 7-8 years (faster for Facebook - 5 years there). Over that time, assuming annual expenses of ~50k/year (single, renting a 1-bedroom in the Bay, leaving you with 20-25k to cover everything else), and sticking everything that's left over into the market, you'd have well over a million by year 8. Let's then pessimistically assume your compensation never grows after it reaches 400k - at that point you'll be taking home ~225k after taxes, or 175k after expenses. Stick that into the market for another decade, you end up with ~5m.

You might say that 50k/year in expenses is unrealistically low for someone living in the SFBA - it's not, really, you aren't even living with roommates and you have five figures to play with after housing and transportation (remember, food is close to free, since most of these places will feed you 3 meals a day M-F if you want). But even if you bump that up to 60k/year that pushes out your retirement date... by a year. Maybe.

This is all inflation-adjusted, mind you. 5m in today's dollars is enough to retire on extremely comfortably, and unless you decide to drastically increase your spending in retirement it'll be growing faster than your draw-down.

I imagine most people who do this either keep working or start working on their own projects. I'm not aiming for this just so I can watch TV all day, let me tell you :)

Those who retire don’t get too public amout it.

And most who could will in fact keep working in some capacity, either because they’re excessively paranoid about the capital markets or they enjoy work too much to quit.

> They need smart people not because logic they write is complex, but because navigating total chaos of internal system complexity needs smartness.

Careful, that's the FANG SWE ego speaking. What you describe isn't smartness but a willingness and patience to put up with lots of bloat.

Many people (including this comment) severely underestimate the sheer volume of information processed everyday by those staff level engineers in big techs.

Imagine that each day you need to review 1~2 design docs, read and reply tens of mails, attend at least 3 meetings and make non-negligible engineering decisions each, keep the lights on, manage and mentor some junior engineers. And write some code and design docs for your own projects upon all the crazy stacks of technical and procedural complexity.

Time is limited resource, so you cannot really have enough time to understand everything needed as scopes expand. You will eventually need to embrace ambiguities and uncertainties stemming from the complexity. And this needs more than just willingness and patience. Perhaps having some level of smartness can help, but this alone might not be sufficient though.

I mean, yes, it's not only intelligence, but also willingness to put up with bullshit, but "isn't smartness" is going too far. It IS taxing on brain.

Much "smartness" is a willingness to work hard, being able to read the room and being willing to put up with a lot of BS.

If you think FAANG is bad, just look at academia.

I'm not at a FAANG but am at a F500.

We're paid well because we have to shift gears a lot, learn a lot, fake-it-till-you-make it, and put up with oodles and oodles of BS.

From a technical standpoint a 16 year old could do my job. We're getting paid for patience and the ability to "code switch" in the socio-linguistic sense.

I think this might be about right. Google's internal tools were built by very smart engineers for use by other very smart engineers. (I'm thinking especially of the Producers Framework as I write this, but there are other examples.)

I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels.

It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.

Producers Framework is awesome. Took me a while to wrap my head around writing code that way. Is there anything open source that is similar to it?

Not that I know of. I don’t think it’s user-friendly enough to succeed as an open-source tool.

FAANGs/large companies in general have a ton of accidental complexity. A lot of the work devolves into "make this work in our complicated environment". Its just more pronounced at FAANG due to the scale.

> but that refactoring requires super duper overqualified people, etc

Yes, and it needs super duper overqualified managers to understand that the super duper overqualified engineers actually are on to something with their suggestions.