> The reality is that with their talent they could earn that per month at FAANG. You are making the mistake in assuming that the FAANG interview process is not

> The reality is that with their talent they could earn that per month at FAANG. You are making the mistake in assuming that the FAANG interview process is not based on a tradeoff: they rather send away many competent people than hire incompetent ones. Due to this, many people with deep technical expertise don't get into FAANG. Think of neuro divergent people. Someone like RMS would not ever pass the cultural fit interview. Think of people who know how to code well in the problem domain but can't do so on a whiteboard. Think of people who have the expertise but lack a degree. Yes, examples exist where such people made it into FAANG, but this doesn't mean that it's really possible for someone like them to make it into FAANG. Yes, many famous OSS people would be hired by FAANG in a heartbeat. But this isn't neccessarily the case for most folks in OSS. Also don't forget that you make 30k per month when in the USA. Quite many senior developers with "FAANG talents" work in lower dev income countries on proprietary software and for some reason don't relocate to the US. Often, a lot of OSS contributions come from them. Godot for example was founded by someone living in Buenos Aires.