If anything, being a FAANG SWE puts you at a disadvantage for ever having stability. Financially risky startups would love to have you, but a lot of industry verticals simply won't take a look at you because they figure you wouldn't be interested or you're perceived as a flight risk. Thing is, if you plan to retire from this profession those are the kinds of jobs you're going to need.
Based on your understanding, if other companies perceived me as being a flight risk because I'd worked in FAANG (?) I probably wouldn't be interested in them either, so it sounds like the system's working as expected.
If someone’s on the receiving end of all of those things they’ll usually leave sooner or later. Who wouldn’t want to?
Even small pay cuts are pretty good at getting people to quit. (uh particularly talented ones that have many options ...)
https://employmenttribunal.claims/employment-law/bonus-dispu...
As for an employee quitting on their own accord before the bonus dispersal date (which they otherwise hit the bar to receive), every tech company I worked for or have friends working at, they have pretty fair systems for dealing with it.
Generally, there is a cutoff date (which is usually about 4-6 months before the bonus disbursal/announcement date). If you leave at any point after that date, but before the bonus announcement/disbursal date, you still get your bonus in full. If you quit before the cutoff date, it gets prorated based on how many days you were an employee between the previous cut-off date and the upcoming one. There is also usually an extra nuance in math for people who just started working at the company and been there less than a year, but that detail is largely irrelevant.
For a specific example, at MSFT, they had a cut-off date somewhere mid-june. The bonus got announced early september and disbursed in mid-second half of september. If you quit at any point after that date in June, you get your full bonus. If you quit exactly 2 months before the cutoff date, lets, say mid April, you get full_bonus*10/12.
It is dishonesty in the service of profit, the simplest type of corruption available. Euphemisms are always just euphemisms.
There's a thousand reasons people stay or leave companies and just slightly adjusting how much you're working to keep people can often be the difference in the attrition rate.