My previous company had this triple threat of compensation problems going on: (1) Didn't offer high enough pay, (2) Got burned badly when they did try to offer higher pay to get senior engineers because they weren't good at identifying top talent anyway (I repeatedly complained and tried to fix this but no one cared), and (3) Was not in an amazingly profitable industry anyway, so they were never going to be able to come close to FANG salaries regardless.
It was sad to see the slow/inevitable march of good engineer being hired essentially by accident (the hiring process didn't recognize them as such and didn't tend to offer them more) and then leaving to greener pastures when they weren't being rewarded properly. When I left, they offered me a near 50% raise as retention offer (why weren't they paying me that already since I was clearly worth it?!), but despite that being a director title, it still couldn't touch the SWE offer at Google ... so here I am.
The biggest overarching problem I would say with most businesses like that is they aren't profitable enough, and engineers can't produce enough value in those companies, to justify really top-tier compensation like what would be necessary to get and retain top talent engineers long-term.
"FANG" isn't exactly an acronym. Broadly speaking, it's a stand-in for the handful of very best, largest, desired (employment-wise), and high-paying tech companies.
"Big 4" or "Big N" is an equivalent term that's a little less confusing, because it doesn't have the pretense of letters to stand for anything at all.
That’s not correct. It actually has nothing to do with that. It is an acronym (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google), and it was a group of high growth tech stocks about 5 years ago, coined by Jim Cramer. It’s not even relevant anymore. It has nothing to do with who pays the most or who is most desirable for employees.
The meaning clearly has changed if it's widely being used in a different way. How do you think all those different definitions of words get into dictionaries?
You're being prescriptivist, whereas language usage is descriptivist.
Jim Cramer invented the FANG acronym to refer to fast growing Internet stocks. He later added Apple. Tech workers now associate that acronym with high paying big tech employers, but Amazon and Apple don't fit that definition.
To be fair, from the tech workers' point of view, it doesn't much matter whether the employer is technically a tech company (Google), a hardware manufacturer (Apple), or a retailer/cloud provider (Amazon). So long as you're getting paid top-bucks in the industry for doing software engineering, which is possible at all of them, then you're golden.
Facebook, Google, and Netflix are known to make better offers than Apple and Amazon (although those two are capable of great offers and have both employed thousands of engineers who became millionaires after stock appreciation).
Amazon entry level software engineer in Seattle starts at over 100k and senior goes way up from there. Particularly with the stock gains of AMZN, engineers are highly compensated.
Not compared to FNG. A big reason for this discrepancy is enforceable noncompetes in Washington. In California, poaching is always fair game, so employers that compete on compensation have to pay accordingly.
If you come from Amazon, Facebook will make an offer accordingly. If you have competing offers from NG, you will get a significant bump during salary negotiation. My sources are offers from these companies for multiple engineers.
It was sad to see the slow/inevitable march of good engineer being hired essentially by accident (the hiring process didn't recognize them as such and didn't tend to offer them more) and then leaving to greener pastures when they weren't being rewarded properly. When I left, they offered me a near 50% raise as retention offer (why weren't they paying me that already since I was clearly worth it?!), but despite that being a director title, it still couldn't touch the SWE offer at Google ... so here I am.
The biggest overarching problem I would say with most businesses like that is they aren't profitable enough, and engineers can't produce enough value in those companies, to justify really top-tier compensation like what would be necessary to get and retain top talent engineers long-term.