Comment by gajjanag

Same. The compensation is substantially better at FAANG, but in terms of actual on the ground work being rewarded, almost never the case.

Meta-work (lots of "cross functional" documents, alignment meetings, sync ups with senior tech leads to brown nose, deliberately creating low quality output to justify hiring more people/growing one's "scope") is 90% of it.

Any actual output is largely accidental, coming from the 20% still naive, or idealistic enough to actually care about what they produce.