i mean, even if we only include Apple Microsoft and Google you're already up to more than half a million employees

Are you confused about the comment?

The majority of positions at any of these (except maybe Netflix) are not hired through negotiable salary packages of the types relevant to the post. I never said anything about overall employee count.

What do you mean? All standard engineering offers (and probably most non-engineering) roles at FAANG are negotiable; in fact, Netflix might be the least flexible - or at least used to be, because they tried to hit what they thought would be "top of market" for you, and would be much harder to budge unless you had an actual competing offer for more than they thought your market value was. (Might be less true today, since they've moved to having actual internal "levels", but idk.)

Because the total employee count as disclosed in annual reports are not limited to solely the typical engineering positions…?

Have you never read a report from any of the FAANGs?

e.g. Out of Google’s 183,000+ total headcount… maybe a quarter are engineering positions with negotiable salaries of any kind.

Yes. If advice can't be followed, it's probably just bragging.