Yes. Not all applications benefit from FAANG experience. There is a lot of work to be done that pays in the 130-200 range that isn't necessarily cutting edge. I should add, benefits are excellent (major medical) and it's a private office.
> Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...
I can believe it. Sometimes, you just need technical excellence to bring a product to market, otherwise you fail. But other times, you can simply apply well understood paradigms to well understood markets and have excellent financial returns.
It's the difference between an excellent business and an excellent product. When you have a choice, choose the excellent business.
Yes, because the employment market is not a free market. You can find (virtually) any employees your heart desires, because workers are highly motivated to not die. In addition, they have no bargaining power, meaning they take what they can get. They don't have visibility either - hiring is a perfect black box to them.
The scales are not only not balanced, they're almost completely tipped. This is why companies can pay below market and still get a constant supply of (shitty) employees. If you simply lower your standards, you can get infinite employees. They could hire children if they wanted, and it would be easy. They could pay 50 cents an hour if they wanted. Luckily, the laws prevent this - but it's most certainly NOT an issue of demand. There's a high demand among children to work and there's a high demand among laborers to work for poverty wages.
We're talking about highly-skilled software engineers and product specialists who are used to being able to command high 6-figure salaries with considerable additional perks (RSUs, bonuses, 3 meals a day on campus, free laundry...)
Those are the folks Meta/Amazon/Google are mandating return to 5 days a week in office. The folks stuck doing manual labour in their fulfilment/data/moderation centres... those ones mostly never were allowed to go remote in the first place.
Everyone likes to believe they're mama's special little laborer. But you're not, you're a cog like the rest of us and the only thing you command is a shitty drip coffee machine in a cramped break room.
This is a matter of class, not a matter of profession. You, and I, are being bullied by our employers because we have absolutely 0 say in how we work our jobs. That's no different than any manual laborer - minus the ones who are unionized.
In a matter of irony, mechanics and such that operate in a union have much more control over their workplace. If their job allowed it, they could trivially strike for the benefit of WFH. That's not a power you have, you're too busy bending over and then later justifying how you wanted to take it all along.
Is the employment market actually giving you that?
Anecdotally, I knew a handful of FAANG engineers with 10+ years experience who had gone full remote before the pandemic, and dozens more during/since. Those are the creme-de-la-creme of the employment market, and they are all hanging out at startups who are willing to play ball on full remote, to get access to talent they otherwise couldn't remotely afford...