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.

I'd argue a design system used by like half the world at this point should hire the best front end engineers at a high salary and that's ok. There are people doing jack shit making more.

They were hiring about two years ago: https://tailwindcss.com/blog/hiring-a-design-engineer-and-st...

A Design Engineer and Staff Software Engineer both for $275k

> Salaries for developers are well under $150k in most of the United States, for example, and that is for senior engineers

As someone who has hired hundreds of SWEs over the last 12 years from 20+ states, I have to disagree.

$150k is on the lower end for base for a Sr. SWE, and well below the total comp someone would expect. You can make the argument that $150k base is reasonable, but even Sr. SWE in the middle of the country are looking for closer to $180k -$200k OTE.

I am really curious about metro areas that are paying 100-120k for senior(in the real sense) devs. Could you please share some metro areas you are familiar with?

100k per month per person is over 1 million a year.

So 2 million per year barely gets you two people.

Most “senior devs” are actually bad.