I'm sorry but I don't believe that. I do understand that line of thought if you are in a very complicated personal/financial situation but you're stating that the only driver is money, which is clearly wrong...
They do it because the money, though. I turned down a FAANG job partly because I'd have to relocate across the US and partly because I didn't think I could sleep at night working for them. Total compensation package for first year was $250-350K depending on performance, and there was a signing bonus. This was 2015 or so.
I often half regret that decision, because it hurts to know I could've ticked that income box rather than fighting month after month to keep work coming in (self employed/contractor).
No, "I have kids" is not an excuse. You do see how that makes this even worse, yes? To pretend to give a shit about future generations while gleefully destroying the liberties of those future generations?
(FAANG salaries are not an "order of magnitude" higher than salaries at other U.S.-based companies for similar jobs.)
FAANG salaries are just at the level at which those companies discovered people are willing to sell their souls, or that is high enough to attract naive people who won't question why it pays more.
Why not get paid by the devil while fighting his plans?
You don't even have to make it obvious that you are cratering it. There are so many shiny things in tech you could make it look entirely incidental.
Part of me reserves hope that this is what some of the engineers inside of Google are doing right now.
To most employers, that would read as "prone to insubordination", and be an immediate red flag. Because each and every one of them will inevitably ask you to do something at some point that will be fucked up.
Expecting engineers to die on this hill for us seems incredibly unfair. To balk at someone not upturning their life and (under the US healthcare system at least) endangering the health and well-being of themselves and their families in the name of dignity or morality when the net result of doing so would be exactly zero because Google can replace them in a heartbeat is, in my opinion, a gross and unnecessary misdirection of blame.
Maybe I'm just really bad at marketing/promoting myself or I gasp have to take work "below my pay grade" because it's still work and I've got bills, but I'm not netting six figures doing highly technical work (embedded development, electromechanical development, board layout and design, etc.). In the last five years I've had one in which I grossed six figures. I'd figure I just suck and am an outlier but I keep hearing the same stories from friends who are also not at big shops.
And the problem comes when you have to cut back all that, you need a job that can support that lifestyle. I believe the best thing you can do if you have a fat paycheck is to exactly take the opposite approach: keep living simply, save as much as you can, yes give yourself a treat from time to time, but essentially keep an average lifestyle.
The day you need to go elsewhere and you find out that you are against the wall because you need that much money and you can't find a similar income is when you're basically screwed.
Altruism is not a default position, and is unusual in the real world.
I'm not saying that's how it should be, or that people shouldn't work to make it otherwise. But you say why don't all those people walk away from that? How far would you go? What if you had children depending on you? It's very easy to condemn other people as "greedy" but you show a lack of understanding, of empathy, perhaps, for how people in general function in the world if you assume they should just do what you say because "obviously, my moral stance trumps their concerns."
Edit: I upvoted your other comment, by the way, where you lay out the very scenario I speak of. Many people are "screwed" because their lifestyle has expanded to their current circumstance. Few people realize that progress in some dimension rarely rules out regress back along the same path. Liberty requires maintenance, because there will always be societal forces aimed at eroding it.
The best kind of truth in my book. I have lots of ideas about poverty but I was actually responding to the trap of high-earners. Careful spending is more critical in impoverished situations.
I mean, we are in a climate crisis and massive worldwide inequality and some really competent people both made this happen and prevented the general public from being able to avoid this - because that happens to profit the few.
Most of the worldwide economy is predicated on this (capitalism). It's a logical outcome.
Wages for developer work are not consistent, though. I was making around $45K out of college in upstate NY in 2011 or so. I left that job around $55K in 2015 when we moved from the area. Those were entirely normal salaries in the NY capital district for developers with a four-year degree and proven skills in a given language.
I'm now in central VA and am friends with the owner of a local media/web development shop. Their average pay is around $20/hour. Remote work levels the field a bit now, but that's what folks who want to work locally at a desk are offered. They have people actually working there, so I guess folks think that's a reasonable pay "for the area."
I mean "order of magnitude" in the sense that a 6-figure salary is an order of magnitude more than a 5-figure salary.
Sweet sweet advertisement money.