First, I think you're overestimating how much you can make as an engineer in SV. It's more, but it's not fair to say $100k is "not even close".
Second, there's more to life than working at, say, Facebook/Netflix/etc for money. The pure happiness of working on something you care about is worth a lot of money to some people.
Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away, and they'll easily add $50k to their starting offer for running a prolific open source project.
Lastly, look at that graph. It's going up. Zero to $100k is really good for 6 months, and in another 6 months it'll potentially double. Most startups don't get to $100k this quick. More people will use this as time goes on, they can start new projects, they can do high-end freelancing for companies using it, etc.
> Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away,
It's true the $100k doesn't immediately disappear, but it seems safe to assume that taking on a full time job would leave a lot less time to do OSS work and would probably result in a non-trivial loss of sponsorship.
Those numbers are real, no doubt about it but even if you potentially have the skills and knowledge to compete for those positions, your odds of getting such a job are still incredibly slim. If you are young, immensely talented(for the lack of a better word), and in a location near the job offering, then yes, there's a chance. But even giants such as FAANGs will have their doubts when you're 30+ and on the other side of the planet, even if your profile fits the needs of a senior engineer better than the youngsters next door, because they are well aware that at this point in your life, your priorities are increasingly becoming children and elder family members and it is incredibly likely for you to pack your bag and leave the moment something goes wrong with your family on the other side of the planet. And with such salaries, you'd be perfectly capable of doing that in 6 months, just when their investment is starting to pay off. Strictly speaking, you are looking at a very small subset of a subset that was tiny to begin with. For most people that doesn't happen even in dreams.
From experience I would say running the OSS project is definitely harder, but the type of person who is capable of making a successful OSS project is not the type of person who can chain themselves to a chair for 3 months and practice interview questions. Studying for FAANG interviews is arduous and extremely non-rewarding. It is like the extreme opposite of an OSS project, where you put in the same hours and have exactly nothing to show for it.
Unless you're doing interesting things at google for that 300-500k, 100k to work on OSS problems seems immeasurably better to me especially because they don't have to live in the bay area.
100k in pretty much anywhere but the east or west coast may as well be 300k.
If we're talking raw numbers, that doesn't compute well.
My last rent in Houston for an actual cool place to live (downtown Westheimer area) was a solid 1.3k, or 15k a year. So after taxes rough estimate 70k - 15k = 55k into your savings account, before expenses etc.
I have the best apartment I've ever had in my life practically on top of 16th mission station right now for 2.1k. I'm not making 300k but if I was, let's see: 210k - 25k = 185k into savings each year, not including expenses. That's 3x the amount of money for investment, savings, playtime in places where the money goes the same distance no matter where your permanent address is.
State and city income tax aren't going to eliminate that 3x difference. Brunch costing 50$ vs 20$ isn't going to make up that difference.
We can talk about quality of life as well but that'll be a much, much longer comment from me, and feels like a pointless conversation (city folk gonna city).
I see the time spent making that 300k at a fang as 40-60 hour a week opportunity cost on better work with the caveat that if you are doing work you consider personally interesting then good for you. I think ultimately we have very different priorities from each other though and view money differently as well.
Well that's fair, though a different discussion. I would argue you could probably find a project at Google that promotes your values, who knows though.
In any case, my numbers hold up for bay area startup salaries as well - if they didn't, I wouldn't live here lol.
I'm currently working on founding a search engine that is in direct opposition of Google's values, or potentially lack thereof, so I think that might be a hard sell for them ;)
And the numbers don't really work out for founders for the first couple years in terms of any salary so I think again we view money differently. I'm not really disputing that your numbers work for being an employee but they don't really hold out for people working to start their own thing, at least in the short term. As I'm sure the OP is aware there's intangible benefits that don't take the form of a retirement account associated with running your own thing.
Edit: I'll also say we may be at a point where we're starting to talk passed each other, your math checks out for sure I just don't value the benefits associated as much.
That's really cool, care to link? I'm slowly extricating myself from Google and Facebook.
I think we don't disagree for reasons other than raw money about why working somewhere other than FAANG would be good. Probably reasons similar to why I don't work at FAANG ;P
Second, there's more to life than working at, say, Facebook/Netflix/etc for money. The pure happiness of working on something you care about is worth a lot of money to some people.
Third, if this person ever wants to get a real job, the $100k won't go away, and they'll easily add $50k to their starting offer for running a prolific open source project.
Lastly, look at that graph. It's going up. Zero to $100k is really good for 6 months, and in another 6 months it'll potentially double. Most startups don't get to $100k this quick. More people will use this as time goes on, they can start new projects, they can do high-end freelancing for companies using it, etc.