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Comment by bankim | Hacker News Reader

FAANGs have changed the compensation game in SF Bay Area, making joining startups for potential financial gains pointless. Benefits are just icing on the cake.

I wonder what techniques startups are using to recruit quality talent in the Bay Area.

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Mission, fun work, and responsibility in my experience.

Being a tiny cog in a huge machine just doesn’t sound appealing to some people. Despite the financial rewards.

Benefits can be a lot more than icing! I live in a low CoL area that makes my on paper compensation seem comparable to at least junior FAANG salaries when factoring that in, but my company and nearly all others in the sector and region have me paying hundreds a month on premiums for health insurance with deductibles in the high single thousands - so it’s not so great a deal after all.

This is based on the presumption that quality talent joins FAANG. From what I've seen so far, it's mostly people that can leetcode their socks off that make it into FAANG.

Startups get people interested in the domain knowledge and everyone else that couldn't make it into FAANG. I agree that it is a bad financial move to join a startup if you could join FAANG instead.

> Startups get people interested in the domain knowledge.

This sounds like an actually good reason to join a startup (or other small company, or be an independent consultant).

Most people at FAANG may not be very sharp, but very sharp people easily make it into FAANG and it's a much better deal than the majority of startups.

Question: why is Amazon included in this cohort but not Microsoft? The total comp packages I've seen from MS dwarf Amazon, which frankly is pretty middle of the road.

It doesn't fit in the acronym

What I usually see is both MS and Amazon are part of the "big 5" tech companies/"tech giants" where Netflix isn't. I think FAANG is really more about stock performance and hype in the past 5 or 6 years (though to be fair, MS has had a really good run in this time span as well).

For the record, having worked at both, this is definitely not true. Amazon and Microsoft have similar pay in many cases looking at levels, and in fact I received more to go to Amazon (and have seen many others do the same), though it clearly happens both ways. You can get a self-reported estimate of this looking at a different fyi site https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Microsoft :)

I mean if you're told 100% of what you need to get into a FAANG company but can't that's all on you. Trying to brush it off as "leetcode their socks" vs preping for a test you know well in advance is hyperbole.

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