> I've been a dev for almost 25 years, and in my experience how much someone is paid has very little correlation to how good their code is. I've worked with outsourced developers in India, Poland, and Vietnam who are brilliant at writing clean, robust, well-designed code and earn the equivalent of low-two-digits thousands of dollars per year, as well as former FAANG engineers who earn three-digit thousands of dollars and write untested, untestable spaghetti code.

That has not been my experience at all.

There's this myth of the genius dropout in our industry, or that FAANG is basically luck, and yet it always fails to materialize.