Is this just a really well kept secret? I don't really see many engineers trying to migrate from the first class to the second class. I'd expect most software engineers would jump through hoops at the prospect of doubling their salary.
I worked at a FAANGs, now I work in lower-tier tech company. I make 3/4 (low-ish upper tier) of what I used to make, I work 1/8 of the hours I used to work, work stress is non-existent. Many people, many reasons.
Yours would be way more desirable than the FAANG stuff. People could moonlight for your job easily…
For me, the former type of job required very little actual work. It was comfortable. It was easy. It paid well enough for a single young person. My nights and weekends were free to pursue other interests, some of which were very time-consuming (e.g. flying helicopters part-time in the military).
The big turning point for me was having kids. The inherent danger of flying caused me to leave the reserves. The increased monthly budget required for kid-raising got me out of my comfort zone. I looked for a new job for the first time in 10+ years. My TC now is double what it was when I started that process 2.5 years ago and I'm well into the latter category. Partly that's due to moving to a name-brand company. Partly it's just a great market for SWEs. Partly it's years of 3 - 5% COLAs that made me fall behind market rates.
Switching jobs is hard mentally & emotionally, especially if you're basically comfortable already. I suspect that's why many people don't do it.
It really isn't comparable. The way SV people work, the expectations, level of responsibility, selectivity in hiring, and sometimes hours/stress, are of a kind only found in law or medicine elsewhere.
It's very hard. Not having FANG/unicorns on your resume probably contributes massively to this. FANG style interviews are a skill of their own - I recently had a 6 hours of interviews back to back with Amazon and it was a mix of pretty tough technical questions and very specific behavioral questions. Even with practice solving sole of the question was very hard. For instance, I solved a DP question in a top down and interviewer asked me to then solve it bottom up for him in the remaining 5 minutes. You can't do this without a solid amount of practice.
What's always been a little baffling to me, though, is how easily these companies hire fresh grads. I have several friends that walked straight into FAANG jobs right out of school with little more than a couple quick phone interviews. One recruiter told me that the bar is lower for fresh grads because they can be more easily molded into the company culture.
so, If I'm fresh grad with 3 years of commercial, full time experience, then it'd be better for me to lie that I have no experience? :o
My views here are purely anecdotal, and based only on interactions with former peers (students) and something an Amazon recruiter told me at one point.
Do you have kids? Have you thought about generational wealth? These are the things that are in people's minds. If you want to understand more visit subreddits like /r/FIRE or /r/bogelheads or /r/personalfinance?
Being able to donate a decent amount to a cause whenever I feel like it, is a plus.
Mo money mo problems.
The less obvious one is save a shit ton of money so you never have to worry about big healthcare expenses, whether it be illness or injury. It's amazing how quickly life can go from pretty good to pretty not good when you're unable to work for a while, especially when your health insurance is tied to your employment. One bad bike accident took me from a six figure income at the beginning of my career to struggling for over a decade, including a stretch of homelessness.
This is the dream. Get the second half of my life for myself, if I'm lucky.
If you don't make a very conscious decision to step off that flywheel, a lot of people find themselves in the position where that 500k is mostly going to maintain your new normal lifestyle.
Unfortunately hard to predict those events at the time of house purchase. Some people do very well on Bay Area real estate, some not so well.
In what areas did the pandemic wipe out housing prices?
Obviously not, but do diversify your investments.
A lot of homeowners are putting the vast majority of their portfolio in real estate due to the inflated home prices. Most folks taking on a $1 million mortgage with $200k down, don't have an addition $500k of other assets to fall back on if the housing market drops half the value of their house.
It's only a for-sure viable option for those that never marry or have children. And even then I'd caution someone to do it as long as you possibly can stand, you have no idea what lies ahead expense wise in life in your long retirement.
You simply have to experience or hear second hand.
Or just go to teamblind.com and ask people's experiences
At a smaller company there simply isn't that much work to do, nor is there much of a path for promotion (when your boss is the CTO...)
Ouch! That’s exactly right. Ultimately I bailed on small/medium companies because of the “boss is the CTO” promotion problem. There’s nothing to grow into at a smaller company. Also, most of them have no technical promotion track for Individual Contributors. You start at Junior Engineer, maybe get promoted to Senior Engineer, and that’s it. No more level ups unless you want to people-manage, which is a whole different skill set.
Contrast that with some place like Google, that has something like 7 or so distinct engineering levels with huge pay bumps and responsibility bumps between each of them! If you are a ladder climber by nature, the smaller company will infuriate you.
EDIT: (I just answered the inverse of your question didn't I?) People definitely grind leetcode for a FAANG gig after working elsewhere.
I don't think they can in the first place. It's like law, where compensation is highly bimodal.
This skew is not obvious to people outside Silicon Valley, but it's discussed more now that sites like levels.fyi are providing data. Even more shocking is the split between SV/NYC/SEA salaries and the rest of the world. When the Google internal Salary Spreadsheet was created, people were amazed and the difference in salaries between LON/EU SWEs and US SWEs given that both groups are equally skilled.
Getting a FAANG job is hard, but it's worth it for the ability to retire after a decade of hard work compared to working for multiple decades at a normal tech company.
Don’t get me wrong. it might just be that life’s not fair.
It won't happen here, because our working class is asleep to the economic game being played, but the best blend is probably the UK and it's where we need to head as far as our demands.