Yeah, well FAANG is just part of the industry and contains multitudes. There's people making $60-80k working for FAANG in SV. You might be surprised. For a goo

Yeah, well FAANG is just part of the industry and contains multitudes. There's people making $60-80k working for FAANG in SV. You might be surprised. For a good portion of the US that's decent money. Now some areas of software you're going to see a little better, often, but not much. In probably 80%+ of the country (at least geographically), it's 80-140k for experienced technical people. IT tends to do worse, unless you're the kind of IT that's very technical. Now at the top end of that ~$120-140k, it may seem nice (btw this is "FAANG money" for a good portion of the country... no really, as in, this is literally what FAANG pays top engineers in many regions outside silicon valley). I wouldn't call that typical, though. In the US we also expect engineers to move into technical management in order to advance their salaries beyond low six figures, or less. You do sometimes see "super-technical" roles, but if they do it right you have to be REALLY good, experienced, and essential to the organization (one of their top 3-5 MVPs across the entire organization, not just the technical side). I wouldn't be shocked if such roles happened from time to time in Europe, too. Maybe, we aren't so different, but I do notice my co-workers staring longingly at the compensation we get here... which is again, limited to a small subset of jobs; if they were in the US working for the same company it wouldn't be much better, but they could move to SV.