alt Hacker NewsHeh, it's much easier to drive a brand new Porsche than make 600K or save 5M bucks from a 9-to-5.
It was much much easier ten years ago, too.
That's one of the clearest examples of the difference between income-vs-wealth and the difference between "high cost of living" and "every expense is higher." If your higher salary offsets your higher cost of essentials of SV plus goes beyond that, a Porsche is much more relatively affordable to you than someome making the "inflation adjusted" amount in Ohio. (Or if you're looking to retire earlier, you can put more away for that too.)
In the last few decades the part you're missing in your math is that the trick is NOT to take 5% gains. Instead, keep it in the company. The wealth people have gotten from working BigTech hasn't been higher base comp or even TC, it's been specifically stock in BigTech.
In the last 15 years there have been several significant Big Tech valuation-jumps that have helped people save $$$$ too, but won't necessarily help the next round of folks. Amazon, Google, Meta are both up 10x since 2014. Apple is 20x+. So if you started then with an equity package worth 500k... 2022 was also a great time to start at Meta, and a decent (2x+) one at Amazon. 2020 even was a great time to start at Apple, up 6x since then. And before then, 2002-2014 was also a wildly good time to be at Amazon or Meta or Apple or Google. Better, even, for some of them!
So that's a good 25-years of wild gains. The "regular" employees who benefited from that timing are somewhat-understandably now saying just everyone can do that and have great results. I'm not sure if I'd make that bet myself in 2026 with the changes to things from AI. Though none of them are pure-SAAS that's easy to duplicate, so... maybe still go for it!
I think I'd be way too bored, though. Last time I considered a job offer from one of them, I just decided to throw a bunch into stock in the company instead and took a startup offer. It worked out ok as a hedge, if not AS good as taking the offer would've been.
Yea, the problem with the "go work for the next FAANG" advice is that you need a crystal ball. For every person who got in early and held their stocks for a 20X gain, how many other people got in early at some other company that went nowhere, and they should have sold their stocks immediately? How do you know which kind of company you are at? You can't know until it happens.
I have always believed that stocks go up and down mostly randomly or at least non-deterministically, and anyone who tells you they can simply look at a company and know whether the equity will 20X or 1/20X is full of shit. Nobody has a crystal ball. Some people guessed right and some people guessed wrong.