> There are only a handful of companies that pay $400k/yr for senior software engineers and MSFT ain't one of them
This claim is false.
There are a lot more than "a handful" of companies paying $400k for senior engineers. MSFT will also pay you this amount in the Bay.
Overall, top tech pay about the same. You say FB pays better than MS in Seattle, and perhaps that is the case (as I stated above, I'm mostly familiar with the Bay, not so much with Seattle). In the Bay, the pay is very similar. There could be many reasons why FB would pay more than MSFT in the Seattle: for example, MSFT has a huge office there, and FB probably only a small one. So it's a pretty wise strategy for FB to offer larger pay for the small amount of positions they have there, and in this manner poach some of the best talent in Seattle, while for MSFT it would be prohibitively expensive to raise salaries across the board at Redmond.
That still doesn't change the big picture, which is that top tech pay is largely equivalent, outside of a few anomalies here and there.
No, they do not. Again, obviously you have never worked at a FANG company otherwise you would probably realize this. It's quite a well known fact in the Valley that FB/Google pay much better than MSFT/AMZN.
FYI, I got offers from FANG companies, specifically the ones you mentioned. There used to be a gap, but on the last round the AMZN numbers were effectively the same as Google's. My guess is that over the last few years they faced the necessity to pay equally.
I have friends working at MSFT in the Bay and their current pay also falls in line with the numbers mentioned in this thread. Of course, they're senior engineers.
Even in Seattle it's well known that FB pays more than MSFT. So your theory about top tech needing to pay top dollar etc, doesn't hold.