Obviously market, location, expertise will vary, etc.
YMMV.
The thing about pay that the job hoppers apparently don't take into account is that levels aren't static. Looking at my own network over the years, virtually everyone I know has been promoted or otherwise landed more senior roles, to varying degrees on both sides. You may also have noticed a significant increase of "staff engineers" in the past few years, whereas the role was basically unknown some 10 years ago. Many companies also have been quietly giving out retainer bonuses/raises to slow down attrition.
Since I started my career, I've had multiple significant compensation increases, some from raises, some from promos, one from a team move, and some from changing jobs. Increasing your experience/expertise over time can have a huge impact. Going from no-name companies to household names can have a huge impact. Relocating can have a huge impact. Negotiations (even internal ones) can have a huge impact. There isn't a one-glove-fits-all when it comes to an individual's opportunities for comp growth.
On the other hand, stagnation is very much real. There are plenty of people that do nothing in terms of career progressions, negotiations, etc and just wait for year-end bonuses to fall into their laps. It'd naive to be surprised these folks aren't keeping up pay-wise.
Not only FAANGABCDEF, but "Staff+, with specialized skills, at FAANGABCDEF, in a small number of specific metro areas". If 1 software engineer can be found who makes $700K for every 29 software engineers at other companies/metros/levels who make $100K, Hacker News Commenters will tell you that "Software engineers make $700K". Important to point out there are a lot of other things in play that make it more complex.
Get a single +39% increase is one thing.
Getting a +39% increase every single time you change jobs isn't going to happen. If that was possible, you could change jobs every year for a decade and be earning 27X what you started with. If you started at $100K, that would put you at $2.7 million year after 10 iterations.
That's why whenever someone insists that job hopping is an easy way to get huge pay increases, it's probably more a sign that they're early in their career and/or that they haven't been keeping up with compensation negotiations. For people at the sharp end of the compensation scale, job-hopping stops becoming an easy option for compensation increases.
A lot of people a lot of people are making less money than they could be due to being complacent about reaffirming their own value. America, and most of the modern world, runs a labour market and to properly value a good in a market you need real sales data - I think it's a solidly good idea to interview regularly, be prepared to job hop... but make a sane evaluation about the decision before committing to leaving or joining a particular job. Most employers over-advertise their business because... well... advertising works - so the grass might not be greener on the other side. But if you have an offer for 120k and are currently making 80k from an employer that values you you can discuss that with your employer to seek a salary equalization.
This decreases over your mid-career. You can still get good job bumps of 15% - 25% in your mid years by job hopping.
But later in your career you will get rewarded by loyalty and sticking around. Those massive salaries that everyone brags about generally (not always, but usually) come from internal promotion or from poaching. Those careers require you to be part of specialized teams with high-value business-specific knowledge. Those job roles are not given to engineers who job-hop. Simply put, in your late career, if you are only staying at companies for 12-18 months, then you are not getting deep enough into your specialty to be worth the insane salaries. So long term loyalty becomes much greater rewarded.
This is another reason why I recommend people stay away from FAANG early in your career and move to those jobs later. Early on, you should job hop through smaller companies where you aren't as enticed to stick around and you can more easily get promotions. Then settle down later in your career at the large companies who want and reward loyalty with insane compensation packages.
11 years in the (relatively young) tech industry is quite the tenure at this point, _imo_.
My point was that the market is hot. Hot enough for an 11 year "veteran" to still get a 39% increase. Also want to point out I've "hopped" as many jobs in about as many years. Some people coming into the industry get taken advantage of compensation wise for a multitude of reasons just to get their foot in the door. I also strongly believe in skill stagnation at certain companies and hopping is the only way out.
Again, none of these arguments really matter as it comes down to individual experiences.
YMMV is right. There's a lot of factors here. It's almost meaningless to take averages without qualifying those against a fairly large number of conditions.
Total comp North of 300K for an IC sounds like science fiction to many folks which aren't in Silicon Valley, in certain fields, and in certain companies.
People are saying $350k remote jobs don't exist. Which obviously is untrue (go work at Airbnb). But they're exceedingly rare.
Looking at a few non-SV cities such as Seattle, Chicago, Nashville, Orlando, Sacramento, Austin, and Fresno it costs $14-18k/year more to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area than to rent in those other places.
The average monthly spending on food in SF is about $150/month more than the US average. That's under $2K/year.
California does have a high income tax. For someone moving from somewhere else to California you might have to pay them maybe 10% more to compensate for that.
Putting it all together, a job that pays around $100k/year in non-SV non-NY decent sized cities should need to pay if we are generous maybe around $140k/year due to higher COL in the Bay Area.
That Bay Area tech pay is way more than that suggests that something other than SV COL is the main factor.
“compensation” is something I can trade for cash once I have earned it and then exchange for good and services.
Besides that, it takes the average startup 7-10 years to exit. As opposed to a public company where you can diversify your risk every three to six months depending on your vesting schedule.