Google has to try to hire and keep satisfied thousands upon thousands of engineers of various talent levels.

A smaller team just has to pay more than that for a few tens, and perhaps offer more interesting work besides.

Google hasn't kept up with industry pay. As a senior Google engineer, you can get much better pay in other firms.

High performing hedge funds make way more money per employee than Google.

Snowflake and Databricks also hoover up a bunch of engineers, snowflake in particular extracted a large number of extremely senior folks. I assume they match base comp, offer equity, and then give people a lot more freedom than they would have at BigCo.

I don't know what you mean by this.

Are you saying trading companies aren't profitable enough?