You could pay them in other means, but there were constraints there are obvious constraints that I did not spell out. We are assuming a non-growing company that now needs to pay extra cash to you top up employee comp with cash. Your margin will start to shrink, and so does your earnings (the premise was no growth, remember), continuing the downward trend of your stock.

Plus, your competitors are not sitting still. People will go work for the more exciting companies even if you pay them equal amounts anyway (to vary their type of work and grow their careers) rather than staying and watching the thing die and doing the same thing for 30 years.

> This is not only baseless but also flies in the face of reality, as other tech companies, including other FAANGs, barely offer any stock and still manage to attract top talent.

Which one?

Netflix is known for having all-cash offers.

Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that. Every other large tech company has generous stock grants, and as you pass a couple years of experience your stock will generally be larger than your cash compensation.

> Netflix is pretty much the only FAANG that does that.

Netflix is also 20% of FAANG companies, so that's not as lonely as it sounds.

In the context of this discussion, it is more useful for FAANG to mean any tech company or tech adjacent company employing a lot of software engineers with comparatively high pay, in the form of cash or cash + stock.

Right, but they're a strange company that just happens to be in FAANG. Pretty much every other large company, in the FAANG acronym or not, will give you equity.

Netflix is in FAANG only to make the acronym nicer