Lack of talent at the job, or lack of ability to perform in their notoriously-grueling interviews (I'm brain-dead after ~2 hours of a normal interview battery, personally) means that a whole lot of devs can never make FAANG-tier money, because they can't hack it at the job, because they can't hack it at the interview for one or more of several reasons, or because being pretty sure that the second thing is the case means they never make the enormous time investment to try.
So we're stuck in the middle of the trimodal dev-comp curves, permanently. Except for those stuck in the bottom one. Those two curves are most developers.
So we're "not FAANG-level", the most important consequence of which is we do alright (middle-class lifestyle, judged by what we used to consider middle-class before that started to slip downward to include all non-poor on account of the middle class shrinking and everyone wanting to avoid acknowledging it) but will never, ever get rich (upper-middle money or higher) working our day job.
That's the ego of software developers speaking. The presumption that there's a strict hierarchy of competence based on what company you've worked at is a dumb and arrogant idea imo. Sure you might've passed a tough interview test, but you're doing CRUD that every else does, so putting devs onto that ladder is silly especially when the interview does not reflect how well one does at the job/getting results, with all it's variances and challenges.
Money.
Lack of talent at the job, or lack of ability to perform in their notoriously-grueling interviews (I'm brain-dead after ~2 hours of a normal interview battery, personally) means that a whole lot of devs can never make FAANG-tier money, because they can't hack it at the job, because they can't hack it at the interview for one or more of several reasons, or because being pretty sure that the second thing is the case means they never make the enormous time investment to try.
So we're stuck in the middle of the trimodal dev-comp curves, permanently. Except for those stuck in the bottom one. Those two curves are most developers.
So we're "not FAANG-level", the most important consequence of which is we do alright (middle-class lifestyle, judged by what we used to consider middle-class before that started to slip downward to include all non-poor on account of the middle class shrinking and everyone wanting to avoid acknowledging it) but will never, ever get rich (upper-middle money or higher) working our day job.