They’re not paying the top of market salary. They are paying a 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.

If you think FANG is market salary you understand neither what the FANG acronym represents (the very top companies in the industry) nor what market salary means (average salaries - NOT what top companies can pay in SF).

It turns out supply and demand are both curves, not points. A "market salary" is the entire graph--and even that is vastly oversimplified.

lots of people think that vc money rates are market rates.

Do they also think that Lamborghinis are “market cars?”