Yes, you are right, is mostly money. But there is other stuff that at the end adds up, specially if you are a Senior Engineer in a FAANG company:
* Very few recruiters outreach mentions any kind of compensation expectation. Why would I bother with hours of chat, screening and interview loops if I know only a handful companies offer the same kind of compensation I'm used to receive?
* The bar of a Senior position is quite high, so high that most Senior engineers would not pass it, it requires months and months of preparation. I would do that only if I was absolute sure I wanted to leave my current job.
* I would be willing to receive a little less if a company could offer something that I don't have like a better commute, work on something I'm more passionated about, etc... However, most companies think that working from home is good enough to justify a 50% lower compensation.
The only exception that I can think that compensation is not the main point is if you are trying to hire someone so successful and rich that money doesn't really matter for them. But my guess is that this kind of people are even more rare than senior people.
I've paid off my mortgage and am now more open to working on something more altruistic than selling ads for slightly less pay. The problem is I can't find any interesting without a large paycut.
Really? Are you in the Bay Area? If so, I find it hard to believe there’s not at least one startup within 10 miles of your current employer doing something at least vaguely interesting (or, at least more interesting than selling ads).
that's the thing; I mean, yeah, we'd all take small pay cuts for a lot of things; but dropping out of a FAANG company to one of the companies that is having a hard time hiring is a massive pay cut.
Like, for me; I'd be so happy to take a 20% (hourly) pay cut and work half-time for 40% of my current total pay and go to school the rest of the time. But as far as I can tell, the hourly paycut would be more like 50+% just on the hourly, so I'd be looking at like a quarter the total comp, and the prestige cut (and thus hit to future earnings) would be huge, as I'd have to go work for a startup/small company.
I guess this will make more sense if marginal tax rates go back up.
You have to be a senior at Google or Facebook, maybe Bing, but nowhere else would be cutting your pay for a fixed amount of experience unless you can't get an interview at Netflix
One problem that I do have is that, although I'm prepared to take a relatively large pay cut if I'm really passionate about something, one thing I do care about is working with capable colleagues and being able to actually achieve the thing I'm passionate about. That's less likely to be the case when a job doesn't pay well, unfortunately.
The term "FAANG" initially comes from the stock markets, where those 5 where hot new tech stocks, and Microsoft was a boring, established player. Nowadays it's more used as a shorthand for "the big tech/internet companies", not the specific members indicated by the letters (e.g. Netflix is an outlier, and Microsoft probably closer to the others than it, in many ways)
* Very few recruiters outreach mentions any kind of compensation expectation. Why would I bother with hours of chat, screening and interview loops if I know only a handful companies offer the same kind of compensation I'm used to receive?
* The bar of a Senior position is quite high, so high that most Senior engineers would not pass it, it requires months and months of preparation. I would do that only if I was absolute sure I wanted to leave my current job.
* I would be willing to receive a little less if a company could offer something that I don't have like a better commute, work on something I'm more passionated about, etc... However, most companies think that working from home is good enough to justify a 50% lower compensation.
The only exception that I can think that compensation is not the main point is if you are trying to hire someone so successful and rich that money doesn't really matter for them. But my guess is that this kind of people are even more rare than senior people.