Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?

The gap between FAANG and non-FAANG salaries is quite substantial. For example, a Staff Engineer at an avg startup might get $250k base salary, in a HCOL area and maybe a 10-20% bonus.

But a FAANG Staff Engineer will get a similar base, and then $1mil in stock for 4 years.

-- Are there people outside of FAANG and Big Banks / HFT firms making those kinds of monies?

-- if So who are they? and what do they do?

> -- Are there people outside of FAANG and Big Banks / HFT firms making those kinds of monies?

Yes.

> -- if So who are they? and what do they do?

OpenAI, Anthropic and crypto bug bounty hunters.

Yes, the top cloud customers of the big three cloud providers are making similar, if not more. Startups in the cloud space are similar.

Yes. Some of the opportunities exist in odd corners of the software universe.

To offer just one example, I'm aware of a software company that does nine figures in ARR making high performance computing software for very large financial institutions. There's basically no chance you've ever heard of them. They're very low key. The company hasn't grown headcount much in the last decade, and their employees don't really leave. But some of their people writing really low-level code are certainly making multiples of representative peers at FAANG.

Look for organizations that have very large amounts of money, where software is critical to them continuing to make that money (or where their money was given to them to create something that in turn someone believes will be worth large amounts of money). Generally follow the money.