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Comment by AQuantized | Hacker News Reader

The criteria was that is was the best job available in the world's wealthiest country, not that it was palatable to a someone living in a very poor country plagued with issues much lower on Maslow's hierarchy

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Lots of American developers would love for a FAANG salary too. Total comp at a FAANG is now, what like $500-800k for a mid-senior position? Outside of a handful of areas in the USA, that same person would be earning, maybe $100k, no stock, and passable benefits.

Mid-senior is more like $300-400k.

I really don't think that changes the point!

^^^ Burrito is right, levels.fyi is your friend.

Ok? what is your point? Are they physically and mentally capable of achieving that? How much do they desire that goal? Are they willing to sacrifice other things in their life for that? Its not like FAANG employees are picked out of a hat

Working for FAANG simply isn't sustainable. First of all, it's very difficult to get a job there as an engineer. And even if you did, most people don't last very long: I think the average is like 2 years. And, even if you somehow manage to stay longer than 2 years, you're going to keep getting abused with high pressure work environment: I've heard several first hand accounts of this. and you can find evidence of the same, all over glass door if you read the reviews.

There's also plenty of people who refer to Google as a retirement home. It's a huge company, individual experiences will vary.

It's not that difficult, FAANG (literally just those 5 companies) employ probably at least 5% of the SWEs in the country; add in all the other companies that pay comparable money and you're probably at 8-10%. Something that 10% of engineers can do (and, realistically, much more than 10% - how many engineers have never even tried to get in? At least half?) is, by definition, not "very difficult", relatively to the baseline level of difficulty inherent in the job.

I don't know why you think the average tenure across FAANGs is 2 years but it no doubt varies heavily by company. As another comment mentioned, Google has notoriously good WLB, and any individual team will be more predictive than the company as a whole. You'll hear plenty of "first-hand accounts" of high-pressure work environments because hundreds of thousands of engineers work at those companies!

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