The short tenure is a symptom of a larger problem. The deeper problem is that very little is expected of big company software employees. Conversely those same employees tend to expect a lot in return. You can call that entitlement, poor expectation management, first world problems, and all kinds of other names.
I have not worked for a FAANG, so maybe things are different there, but I don't suspect so. People are people no matter where you put them.
Increasing compensation is not the solution. It can be a factor in a larger solution, but just increasing compensation increases employee entitlement which makes this problem worse, not better.
The best solution I have seen is risk/reward. Put people in charge of their assigned effort with real adult danger of liabilities. Likewise, award them for their successes. This is called ownership, and it works because it modifies people's behavior. The rewards and liabilities do not have to be tied to compensation. Actually, associating these rewards/liabilities to social credibility within the team/organization appears more effective because it reinforces the targeted behaviors.
I have seen this missing in all of my software career until my current employment. Conversely people in the military are pushed into this liability/reward scenario from the very beginning and its very effective. It has always been striking to see the difference in my dual career progression.
>I have not worked for a FAANG, so maybe things are different there, but I don't suspect so
it is quite a bit different at FAANG. I've workded for small companies, huge companies that aren't software/FAANG, and now FAANG, and it's definitely better here.
The floor is very high for talent and just an overall ability to get stuff done. Google certainly doesn't have a monopoly on genius coders, i've met brilliant folks at all different size companies.
It is very good at making sure the caliber of the average engineer is quite high. Code quality is shockingly good across teams and codebases. I said good, not amazing, there are definitely differences in teams and I can cherry pick projects outside of google that had better code than some at google.
But the consistency of it being decent is very high.
I'm also dubious of your claim that compensation doesn't attract better talent. In my 25+ years of coding, it's a pretty damn strong correlation. The people who leave google to go to even higher paying places like the top hedge funds or Anthropic are not the most 'average' caliber talent, it's usualy the better folks.
I don’t think the expectations are any less, it’s just different. Much more responsibility around ops and security