I agree, but I don't think the disruption will go the way you or I hope it would.
Many of the companies that is "one tier" below were able to offer higher comp only because of sky high valuation from the recent bubble. Most of them aren't in the kind of cashflow positions that can sustain such high cost if the stock value correct. If we enter an economic situation where stock value go down for companies like MSFT, Google and Apple, what do you think would happen to the stock price of high flying growth companies that don't even make a profit?
And guess what, most of them are coming to the realization that you don't need to actually pay $300k+/yr to hire some IC just to build React components or spin up another Node.js microservice. I know of quite a few companies (especially the ones that took a beating on the market recently) that's already starting to pivot more aggressively to foreign developers and starting to look at engineering offices outside of the country. If anything, the past two years only made a global workforce to be easier than ever to adopt.
Basically I think given the macroeconomic that's going on, the days when barely profitable or even cashflow negative "growth" companies offering FAANG-beating compensation packages will soon be gone. The numbers just won't add up anymore.
They're already down as much as 80%. If I were looking around today, I'd kill to join one of those high growth tech startups with a solid balance sheet that just got the crap kicked out of its stock.
So what explains it? I would guess both commenters got higher offers at the other company because they did so as part of the job search process instead of via the within-company promotion process.
Either this, or they may be looking at the value of RSUs at vesting (vs. at grant date) to calculate their (perceived) total compensation.
In the latter case they may see wild swings depending on how much the stock went up / down since the grant, and have the perception that they are "underpaid" vs. a friend in other company.
Google's food is good too, but people bitch about it. Arguably they bitch about it partly because it's free which commoditizes its value to zero so they don't value it. At least that's why I suspect Apple charges a subsidized rate.
I saw the same thing where I used to work which also had incredible food. When something is free entitled employees whine about it.
Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.
FAANG is 70% retirees, 30% dipole candle burners. And the 30% provide the value, while the 70% are along for the ride.
See in 2005 when Google was gaining traction and notoriety, it was because they had the reputation of not suffering driftwood.
I was working for a giant transnational (full-on archaic org like that in "Office Space") at the time and found it really hard to fathom a company without apathy and drifters. I (foolishly) thought it ironic and dangerous that a company so determined not to suffers fools had free food, coffee, video games, table tennis, etc in the office. My office had an old crappy second-hand foosball table that was removed because it was "too much of a distraction" despite most people not using it from fear of a reprimand.
Fast foward nearly 20 years and I guess "corporate entropy" gets everyone, eventually.
I'm sure it depends on the company/team, but 70% of retirees, I think it's a myth.
So all the hard workers describe the place as hard working. All the slackers describe it as relaxing.
Among the ex-FAANG, the hard workers describe their team as slacking. I don’t have any ex-FAANG slacker friends. They just stayed.
I’ve got 10 years of friends here and I’m fairly social so I think I’ve gotten a somewhat large sample, at least (if not unbiased).
IMO initially it's possible that folks will not be deterred but that is truly a matter of time and space for the knowledge to be available, make its way through and then impact people's behavior.
This doesn’t make any sense.
What the large companies are paying is the market price. By definition.
It’s literally not possible for all of the big companies to be paying under market price at the same time. That implies some other prevailing market price somewhere else, yet we’ve clearly seen the highest salaries come from the big companies.
The big companies are paying whatever it takes to get the talent they need. That’s market price.
They did and there was a lawsuit about it…
Are you sure these places pay "below market price"? Just curious, what companies would pay significantly more than FAANG?
If they aren’t struggling to hire and retain, they’re paying market rate. It’s as simple as that.
Smart ones are already in the hiring frenzy.