Is it life-changing if those jobs require you (or will soon require) to be in a high-cost of living area and that your landlord will end up pocketing a large ch

Is it life-changing if those jobs require you (or will soon require) to be in a high-cost of living area and that your landlord will end up pocketing a large chunk of your salary (or enjoy your long commute every day). Not to mention a FAANG job isn't for everyone, and it's not really a matter of dumbness. You need to like dealing with the problems they usually deal with (heavy focus on distributed systems - ie. "just use Postgres" doesn't work at that scale), politics, working with other people who just optimized their interview process rather than the actual job, and so on. It has its downsides, for which the salary and perks needs to make up for. The world is increasingly converging into a state where your absolute salary won't matter, as any increase will just make your landlord and/or the taxman richer, FAANG or not.