This sort of thing is one of the big reasons why I would never work for a FAANG company. I prefer to work at a place that encourages good work rather than a weird cutthroat arena combat thing.
I very much made two decisions this year after being Amazoned that prioritized my stress level over money.
1. Deciding not to put my shingle up and go independent. I have the network, the credentials and the knowledge to make more than I was making at Amazon going that route
2. Turning down a position that was going to be created for me by a former coworjer now director to be responsible for the cloud migration and infrastructure for a $7 billion public non tech company that would have also paid more in cash than my total comp at Amazon.
No, I never struck it rich in tech, I was a journeymen CRUD developer/architect when I got hired with two years of AWS experience and above average soft skills.
That said, I suspect this is would be viewed as a benefit of the process since I'm fairly confident Amazon and the like don't want people who feel this way working for them regardless of the talent of those individual people.
Ex: "Are you willing to spend your free time becoming the General's #1 personal servant? No? Sorry, there's no place for you in the infantry."
If one goes by job description Amazon is acting strictly within those parameters. And that race to the bottom is not really hunger games.
On the other hand if one goes by unsaid rules of games, everyone including management, HR, employee know FAANG salary is multiple times of equivalent IT workers. And perhaps 95% of FAANG employees are not really developing new algorithms, hauling terabytes of data on their shoulders or being the force of good whatever that means. Just keep doing made-up work and wait until reach x million dollars goal. After that leave quietly or loudly by writing a nasty blog post lambasting management.
So mostly people understand they have to keep up the facade because talking about what's really happening will make it rather awkward for everyone.
Maybe their executives should stick to peeing in bottles.
However, on the bright side, it is kind of nice that FAANG attracts the type of people who actually think this sort of constant stack ranking arena fighting is okay. Think about it: if they really hated it, they'd leave. Obviously the pay is a huge motivator, but if it was as distasteful as it was to many others, they wouldn't hang around.
But understand, I am not asserting that FAANG companies are places nobody wants to work. I'm asserting that they are places I am not willing to work at. It's because I would be utterly miserable in that sort of working environment, and there is no amount of compensation that could make that tolerable to me.
The engineers I know who work at those places wouldn't agree. But how true that is depends a lot on what sorts of things tend to bother you.