I feel the opposite. A decade ago, it was pretty much Google, Facebook, and some elite trading firms that could pay a ton. Now so many startups have grown up, there’s a huge list of them on levels.FYI that will pay 400k+ for senior and 600k+ for staff. I recently have interviewed for a ton and got rejected a bunch, but I joked with my spouse that there’s so many that by the time you’re done interviewing at all of them you’ve “cooled off” at the original one and can re-interview, so there’s an “infinite loop” of 500k opportunities for experienced SWEs. Despite 90% interview fail, I just accepted a 500k all-liquid offer- despite me not even being at staff level at the company. Hard to say that’s not top of market, and it’s not at a FAANG either.

FAANG is also a horrible acronym for the top paying companies since two of those companies don’t even pay that well. Companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Lyft, LinkedIn and many others will outpay FAANG companies and their equity is fully liquid.

I work at FAANG (not Amazon) and have worked for similar companies. I was rejected by multiple top tier hedge funds after 1-2 tech rounds, after getting a mid tier hedge fund a few years ago. I interviewed with multiple then pre-IPO companies that have since IPO'd. They all asked Leetcode Hard problems on the phone screen even. My original FAANG + hedge fund interviews from a few years ago were not even quite as difficult, just some dynamic programming questions and tricky recursion, mostly Leetcode medium with some hards thrown in occasionally.

I also got an offer from a crypto exchange which is a household name, but they claimed they switched to non-negotiable offers and wouldn't even match my current TC. I had to walk.

Now wondering if this is just some game that companies are playing to either make themselves seem more selective or show "growth" through hiring / headcount to make investors happy. The interviewers also seem less enthusiastic about selling their companies to me, and more like they already made up their minds that they do not like me. One kept asking me more and more questions to cause us to run out of time so that I wouldn't be able to code.

The questions I'm being thrown at all are ridiculous in difficulty now, and the interviews feel like they are designed for me to fail. Who can code a segment tree in 20 minutes? I ended up completing this one, and it wasn't even the hardest question I was asked. I even had a recruiter ask me to prepare for their company's interview by doing TopCoder Div 1 500 problems. That's absurd (IOI difficulty level). There are people in Eastern European countries who do nothing but train for these competitive programming problems with coaches and all since secondary school.

I suppose I will just remain in my relatively cushy FAANG job. Despite having very little time to prepare, being employed while interviewing can be a good thing, after all.

Omg I need to up my reqs in my interviews.

Yes. Ask for 620 though, then they come back at 575 and you just minted half of a 150k salary for being shrewd hehe

Bay area?

Usually refers to San Francisco, California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area