Which is why as a startup you have to offer something that FANG can't offer, like full remote working or similar.
That or taking the people who fail to get FANG offers / naive jrs.
That or taking the people who fail to get FANG offers / naive jrs.
Not saying that the employees are to blame but I'm sure there's plenty of good ideas out there that just don't have the right people trying to implement it.
Or that's such a small amount that it really doesn't contribute.
Really just wondering what that number is.
If you are a startup that just raised 10M$, you just can't go around and pay a few good engineers $500k a year in cash compensation (which is what they would make at FAANG, since the RSU portion of the compensation is basically cash-equivalent, perhaps discounted at 80% if you want to be conservative), even if "a few" is a very small group.
You'll have to settle with offering them $180k base + stock options that on paper might bring their compensation to $500k, 5-10 years down the road, and any reasonable good engineer should value them at 10% of their pitched value, if not less.
It just really never makes sense to join a startup for financial reasons, and I say this as a person who was lucky enough to have a ~1M$ windfall from stock options of a former startup employer: amortized over the amount of time I spent at that company (4 years), I'd have been much better off financially had I been at FAANG the whole entire time (which is where I am now btw, completely done with the startup bs).
Startups & VCs started getting a lot of money in the global search for yield as interest rates dropped to 0 and QE started printing money and giving it to banks who would invest it. The google/apple/etc wage collusion lawsuit increased the amount of competition for engineers. FANG was losing engineers who would rather do their own thing for a little bit less. The H1B lottery system limited the supply. Housing started getting even more expensive in the SFBA. And as you said, FANG prints money so they can afford to keep on going up in the bidding wars.
Compensation started going up in this competitive system as a result until we are at the point we are today, where startups are definitely not competitive comp wise to being at FANG.