FAANG isn't the world.

Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers. Most startups are paying $90k-$140k for senior devs, for example (I haven't done the math, but from my own experience, $100-$120k is the general sweet spot). Larger companies pay a bit more, but move beyond that and you are talking management.

There are plenty of software firms out there (including the one I work for) whose entire budget is less than $1MM, and who have a headcount of developers that's more than 2.

Not every software company is busy writing software to target you with ads.

Blender pays their developers ~ $3M/year. [0]

I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.

[0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.

Lots of great engineers will work for way less than a FAANG salary as long as it means not having to work for FAANG. $1m/year still won't get you all that much though.

Or like 10 senior engineers in mid sized companies in Europe.

I wish every engineer were paid FAANG money.

One million a year would easily buy you 10 experienced full-time engineers in most of Europe.

Tailwind is not a FAANG, they are glorified frontend CSS devs

Huh, FAANG salary comes at FAANG level revenue / profitability generated. That salary is not some kind of human right.

That's barely two low level faang engineers after full load.

Failwind? Alewind? Nailwind? Galewind?

I’m struggling to figure out which letter in FAANG represents Tailwind. Not sure why they need to be paying FAANG salaries.