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Comment by RMPR | Hacker News Reader

> I'm a developer, and a decent one - not FAANG level by any means, but decent

This statement rubs me the wrong way. What does that mean being "FAANG level"? It's either a misconception of what is going on there or underestimating yourself... Or both

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> What does that mean being "FAANG level"?

Money.

Lack of talent at the job, or lack of ability to perform in their notoriously-grueling interviews (I'm brain-dead after ~2 hours of a normal interview battery, personally) means that a whole lot of devs can never make FAANG-tier money, because they can't hack it at the job, because they can't hack it at the interview for one or more of several reasons, or because being pretty sure that the second thing is the case means they never make the enormous time investment to try.

So we're stuck in the middle of the trimodal dev-comp curves, permanently. Except for those stuck in the bottom one. Those two curves are most developers.

So we're "not FAANG-level", the most important consequence of which is we do alright (middle-class lifestyle, judged by what we used to consider middle-class before that started to slip downward to include all non-poor on account of the middle class shrinking and everyone wanting to avoid acknowledging it) but will never, ever get rich (upper-middle money or higher) working our day job.

That's the ego of software developers speaking. The presumption that there's a strict hierarchy of competence based on what company you've worked at is a dumb and arrogant idea imo. Sure you might've passed a tough interview test, but you're doing CRUD that every else does, so putting devs onto that ladder is silly especially when the interview does not reflect how well one does at the job/getting results, with all it's variances and challenges.

It certainly could be both! And I get what you mean, I always feel weird if I say something like that because it's not exactly what I mean but it's the best way I know to articulate it.

I'm sure every FAANG has dead weight, but I've always had the impression that in part due to the compensation the best of the industry tend to gravitate there. That certainly may have changed in the last decade when I think that idea got solidified in my mind.

There are plenty of middling engineers at FAANG-class companies. It is true that they have more rigorous standards and employ above average engineers, but that isn't the primary driver of the comp: these companies have to pay a premium to attract engineers in part because working at a huge (and in many cases unpopular) company isn't fun.

Source: Worked at Microsoft for about a decade.

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