You could probably also get 2x what you're making now in finance. Why do people work for FAANG companies when they could make so much more in finance? A mix of

You could probably also get 2x what you're making now in finance. Why do people work for FAANG companies when they could make so much more in finance? A mix of culture, technology, perks, and prestige. Why would someone work for SpaceX for 2/3 the salary? Because they're putting rockets in orbit. The other factor is that I don't think SpaceX see software as a differentiator. They have talented software engineers, sure, but a lot will be a very different type of software engineering to the typical FAANG sort, lots more real-time and embedded software. I believe their main piece of non-real-time/embedded software is their inventory/work management application which is all on the Microsoft stack. My gut feeling, could be wrong, is that your average .NET dev makes less than your average dev at a FAANG company. The market may just not need the higher salaries.