The average SUCCESSFUL founder is in their earlier 30s. At that point - you should be at least L4 (probably L5) at FAANG. Salaries are about ~$450k at that level and age.
In 5 years, if you work even a fraction of as hard as you need to be a successful founder, you should be L7 - salaries are usually >$800k at that point.
No, it is not like any average slacker straight out of college in 5 years can get to a $1M salary at FAANG. But if you're the type of person that could successfully grow a company to a multi hundred million valuation in 5 years - you can make $1M at FAANG.
2. Going from L5-L7 is _not_ trivial. It requires a somewhat miraculous combination of being on a productive team with a good boss, a lot of opportunities for showy work and your own gamesmanship around corporate politics.
Is it possible? Sure. But in my short stint at Amazon, I met a lot of people who should have been higher level and were simply not due to missing one of these factors.
A lot of the FAANG companies (all?) have promotion processes that are basically a combination of both peers and managers strongly pulling for your promotion. It often takes a few years just to end up on people’s radars, and that’s a few years of delivering lots of high visibility work and doing lots of tech talks and other sort of corpo-social tasks to get your name out. In a lot of ways, it’s like you’re constantly applying for a new job.
I meant say more about the gaming the politics part, not so much the showmanship and self-promotion part. Say there are several people who meet the criteria to get promoted, which ones tend to get it and which not, based on which political behavior?
Allies, not friends. In that sort of environment, what sort of things get you allies? other than what you mentioned. For example when you say gaming the process, how to approach reviews?
Allies/friends -- doesn't really matter what you call it. It's people in your corner. There's no gaming that I'm aware of. You just have to hope that you are able to get on peoples' good sides. Usually that works alright in the normal course of being a friendly and contributive coworker, but god forbid you have someone who has a chip on their shoulder about you.
Not saying I disagree with your conclusion, but if the question is about which is more likely from the perspective of an individual considering going either route, there’s also an implicit “given that an attempt was made”. You’re only comparing the absolute occurrence of each type of event rather than the occurrence relative to the number of attempts made.
Those aren't entirely overlapping skills. There are plenty of founders whose attitudes and generalist skill sets make them unhireable in the management ranks of FAANG.
The distribution of the ladder is logarithmic. Most never make L6. L5 is often terminal level IC without any “up or out” obligations. Lots of people spend a long time at L5 and retire.
Yes, people are mixing salaries and total comp in this discussion which is unfortunately both common and misleading. It also depends very heavily on the total economic outlook, if you happened to join Google in the fall 2021 cohort your equity was basically going down for the next 3 years and only recovered just now. To claim the average SWE is getting to $1M with that kind of deal is either engagement farming or pure delusion; it has absolutely nothing to do with the reality of most people.
In 5 years, if you work even a fraction of as hard as you need to be a successful founder, you should be L7 - salaries are usually >$800k at that point.
No, it is not like any average slacker straight out of college in 5 years can get to a $1M salary at FAANG. But if you're the type of person that could successfully grow a company to a multi hundred million valuation in 5 years - you can make $1M at FAANG.