How would you confirm this with data?
How would you confirm this with data?
Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms.
More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.
I'm skeptical about the couple dozen. There are a bunch of reasons someone may choose not to work for Facebook or Google. But all the anecdotal information I see--including the migration of people from and to jobs--suggests to me that it's hard for most companies to outbid FAANG (and probably a few other smaller companies) in general.
By these other companies, I mean more established ones like Linked In or pre-IPO like Slack/Stripe. There are quite a few of them and they are indeed competing with FAANGs for talent. But the FAANGs are going to have larger national spread.
My point is, if someone lives in a 2nd tier tech hub they should have a handful options to make dramatically more than average from one of these companies; but the interviews are tough and whether or not they want to have a conversation in the first place are gating factors.
I think the popularity of untyped languages is one example of that. Clearly worse, you're removing an entire class of embedded test and nuking your ability to refactor safely, but huge chunks of the industry don't see that as a bad thing. I'm a worse programmer because I've spent so much time in Python.