With remote work it’s going to be extremely common for teams to “get together” a couple of times per year in person. This doesn’t seem like a bad thing? It’s fine not to like it but it seems valuable.
The biggest boon to a company retreat has always been to come and see a new place but then I've always wished I could share that experience with my family instead.
Have you tried raising more? What went wrong?
> we can't pay FANG
So you're not paying market salary.
People who want the full FAANG experience are welcome to chase/choose that. This article and comment thread is about a hypothesis that there are very good developers who don’t want that full FAANG experience and how employers might meet them at another point on the multi-dimensional frontier defined by (company, interesting problems, pay, colleagues, BS, on-call, work conditions, tech approach, remote, etc.).
Different points in that space have different market rates. The rate to work 3 days/week, full remote, with three other great colleagues on a project personally meaningful to you is different than a 5-day per week job on-site in an open bullpen pushing software to wring more value from a warehouse worker or target ads 0.0001% better.