>Who doesn’t want to make more money given the opportunity?
Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms.
More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.
The FAANGs, and I figure about a couple dozen other major tech companies paying similar comp levels, now have offices spread out across the country. You won’t make as much in say Austin or Denver, but it will still be dramatically better than other local options.
>The FAANGs, and I figure about a couple dozen other major tech companies paying similar comp levels
I'm skeptical about the couple dozen. There are a bunch of reasons someone may choose not to work for Facebook or Google. But all the anecdotal information I see--including the migration of people from and to jobs--suggests to me that it's hard for most companies to outbid FAANG (and probably a few other smaller companies) in general.
Just go to levels.fyi and see what people are reporting per company and region, and of course what is discussed on blind if you're familiar with that. Maybe not outbid but coming within 10-15%, which is going to be dramatically better than other regional options.
By these other companies, I mean more established ones like Linked In or pre-IPO like Slack/Stripe. There are quite a few of them and they are indeed competing with FAANGs for talent. But the FAANGs are going to have larger national spread.
My point is, if someone lives in a 2nd tier tech hub they should have a handful options to make dramatically more than average from one of these companies; but the interviews are tough and whether or not they want to have a conversation in the first place are gating factors.
When we're discussing high salaries there should probably only be one 'A' in the initialism. Apple famously does not have particularly high salaries for engineers. Even if they're above industry average, they're nowhere near the Facebook/Google level.
Tons of people remain at jobs they enjoy/companies they like even if they suspect they could probably get a better offer elsewhere. There are plenty of people elsewhere in the country who aren't interested in moving to Silicon Valley and working for one of the large firms.
More generally there's probably some relation between quality (which is an elusive variable to measure and can be dependent on managers/teams/etc.) and salary--but it's far from a perfect correlation.