I don't know... I hear what you're saying, and I partially agree with it, but it's not as simple as "only FAANG is the problem". There are trickle-down effects on the rest of the industry and society too. Touched upon it in a cousin thread (
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38473513), where I was arguing that the big tech companies have trickle-down effects that drive up wages across industries and makes devs more and more unaffordable to non-tech, non-FAANG companies.
I've never complained about equity or such because I never had any, having never worked for a big tech company. Plus side, I never had to do leetcode either :) But even then, my last job was at a F1000 old-school manufacturer, and even there I was paid $100k, with free lunches, loose PTO, company paid trips, etc. -- all for making a simple frontend in React, utilizing less skill than I ever have before (because it's so specialized into that stack nowadays, vs the old days where you also had to deal with networking, sys admin, VMs, etc.) Those were cultural things they copied from tech companies. At other jobs before that, I was still paid much more than most of my peers, who had better education and who've worked their asses off for years. Before 2023, dev work could launch you into the middle class after just a few months of bootcamp and a good reference or two. What other profession is like that?
I think that's my primary gripe with modern US SWE: it's a get-rich-quick scheme requiring little actual skill or training, and sometimes, little actual work. The work isn't that hard, and something like Upwork is probably more representative of what a realistic market would pay (much less).
If I ever imagine myself to be fairly compensated because not everyone can do coding (which is true)... then I look at how teachers, adjunct professors, electricians, plumbers, truckers, etc. are paid and I realize yeah, no... I just sit on my ass all day, code a few hours a day and sit in on meetings and such and the money comes in. It's not even in the same league as other professions in terms of how hard you have to work vs how much you get paid. Especially when I look at my actual friends in tech proper, who work like 10-15 hours a week by their own admittance a week and make way more money. All around it just screams "bubble".
We're not paid this much because of our skills. We're paid this much because capital was hoping to cash in on the hypergrowth before it bursts.