I have to say however, that for engineers this is a massively good thing, both in terms of being able to work on lots of different stuff, and the compensation implications.
Yes, their employees are making lot of money but where her money ends up going? A large part of that ends up paying rent in a region where there are many others making similar wages like you, and trying to outcompete you out of the best property you can choose to live.
Mostly people at headquarters or major offices get paid large salaries.
Executives make decisions where to open office, they've upphand on the info and have access to money, they buy the land in and around the region where office will be setup, where their employees will want to live.
That way half the money they pay ends right back into pocket of executives while FANG employees have statisfaction of making highest engineering wages.
It doesn't matter how much you make, if you still find yourself doing the same thing you were doing 5 years ago, perhaps, all that money didn't bring you much.
Now, there are exceptions to this where people saved up their salary and launched another business into huge success, yea those benefit the most. But most of the FANG employees will find themselves doing similar job after 5 years, so...
How exactly that extra money has changed your life? Are you driving Buggati or Bentley to your office? Do you have celebrities (male/female -depending on your orientation) caressing your hair while you hack on the code? Did you start a school to teach underprivileged kids?
As we can see most of these luxuries are still not available to majority FAANG employees regardless of how much they make. It's the money on paper, it doesn't buy much power. To have real power in society, having more money than your peers is not necessary - what you need is vastly more money and influence over other people.
And, again, this is if you're single, i.e. no second income, paying a single-filer's tax rate, and no benefit of cheaper housing by having someone to split the expense with, etc. A partner earning any real amount of money speeds this up dramatically. (Kids do cost money, if you have them, but they don't cost enough money to offset having a second SWE income, even if you pay for extremely expensive daycare, unless you have like five.)
I don't know about you, but having "fuck you" money after a decade in the workforce, or "no, really, fuck you" money after 2 decades is a pretty good deal. It is, in fact, much easier to make this happen working at a FAANG (or comparable) than elsewhere. People like to complain about the cost of living, and yes, those complaints are valid, but working at a FAANG it's entirely possible to save more after taxes and expenses than software engineers in other parts of the country make _before_ taxes; trying to equivocate between those situations is really quite silly. The first is in a dramatically better financial position than the second.
I followed the other path - total mental breakdown, severe depression followed by "non-retirement" - working freelance, as a co-founder and in interesting jobs while travelling. Turns out that being a well-paid employee for years and years isn't something I can actually do without getting depressed about it.
Most countries don't have this problem, but it's a bigger problem than even the US' ballooning medical costs.
I think it's less to do with the actual costs of the divorce, and more about converting one household into two. All the equity in the house gets split up, which usually gives a decent deposit for another house for each partner, but nowhere near enough to pay off the whole mortgage. Each partner needs enough rooms to host the kids during their shared custody, so a family of 4 goes from needing a single 3-bed house to needing two 3-bed houses. They need two cars, instead of being able to survive on one. If one of the partners gave up their career for the kids then there's alimony to pay. And so on. The legal bills are like icing on the cake.
The expenses of two people living together are almost the same as of one person living alone. The extra expenses are mostly for the kids (including the mortgage for the larger house). Which means that if one person has a good salary, the other can "early retire" immediately. Or if both have good salaries, they can save half of the income, and perhaps retire as soon as the kids become independent.
A divorce throws all of this out of the window.
Few people want to be completely beholden to the whims of another person for their entire lives.
I'm not arguing that people don't divorce for bad reasons, but there's also a solid reason why divorce is a good idea in many cases.
I will argue against a system where there is a lobby designed to glorify and encourage divorce and stoke marital conflict, followed by a litigation which costs around $200k between both sides to bring to completion, which ends when one side or the other runs out of money.
At that point, in most cases, the custody and financial arrangement is designed to be ridiculously complex and inequitable.
And most who could will in fact keep working in some capacity, either because they’re excessively paranoid about the capital markets or they enjoy work too much to quit.
If you take a pretty standard estimate of career and comp growth for an engineer that joined a FAANG company as a new grad and stuck around, generally speaking they'd get promoted to senior-equivalent within 7-8 years (faster for Facebook - 5 years there). Over that time, assuming annual expenses of ~50k/year (single, renting a 1-bedroom in the Bay, leaving you with 20-25k to cover everything else), and sticking everything that's left over into the market, you'd have well over a million by year 8. Let's then pessimistically assume your compensation never grows after it reaches 400k - at that point you'll be taking home ~225k after taxes, or 175k after expenses. Stick that into the market for another decade, you end up with ~5m.
You might say that 50k/year in expenses is unrealistically low for someone living in the SFBA - it's not, really, you aren't even living with roommates and you have five figures to play with after housing and transportation (remember, food is close to free, since most of these places will feed you 3 meals a day M-F if you want). But even if you bump that up to 60k/year that pushes out your retirement date... by a year. Maybe.
This is all inflation-adjusted, mind you. 5m in today's dollars is enough to retire on extremely comfortably, and unless you decide to drastically increase your spending in retirement it'll be growing faster than your draw-down.
I imagine most people who do this either keep working or start working on their own projects. I'm not aiming for this just so I can watch TV all day, let me tell you :)
Careful, that's the FANG SWE ego speaking. What you describe isn't smartness but a willingness and patience to put up with lots of bloat.
If you think FAANG is bad, just look at academia.
Imagine that each day you need to review 1~2 design docs, read and reply tens of mails, attend at least 3 meetings and make non-negligible engineering decisions each, keep the lights on, manage and mentor some junior engineers. And write some code and design docs for your own projects upon all the crazy stacks of technical and procedural complexity.
Time is limited resource, so you cannot really have enough time to understand everything needed as scopes expand. You will eventually need to embrace ambiguities and uncertainties stemming from the complexity. And this needs more than just willingness and patience. Perhaps having some level of smartness can help, but this alone might not be sufficient though.
We're paid well because we have to shift gears a lot, learn a lot, fake-it-till-you-make it, and put up with oodles and oodles of BS.
From a technical standpoint a 16 year old could do my job. We're getting paid for patience and the ability to "code switch" in the socio-linguistic sense.
I've seen plenty of intelligent people struggle to get their heads around Google's abstractions. The tools are powerful enough, though, that once you get it you can pretty easily build stuff that scales to ridiculous levels.
It could be that better design will make these kinds of tools more accessible in the future.
Yes, and it needs super duper overqualified managers to understand that the super duper overqualified engineers actually are on to something with their suggestions.