What does that matter? You'd decline $10 if it meant someone else got $20? FAANG pays extremely generously. You're either being paid enough to work or you arent; what someone else gets should be meaningless. When you call being paid some of the highest salaries in the world exploitation, you devalue the word.
You sound bitter, greedy and envious. My happiness is related to my own situation, and has absolutely no relation to the situation of faceless CEOs, nor to a potential alternate reality where I have a better situation. You work for a wage; you're either satisfied with this amount or you're not. Being unsatisfied solely because others get more? With your mindset, literally no one can be content in the world except billionaires.
That's what corporation would say about an employee wanting to be compensated fairly. Such behaviour in the past sparked communist revolutions, which have not ended pretty for the greedy capitalists.
They don't match profits though. Basically these companies take most of the value produced by workers out of their hands. Their work is so valuable that even the pittance FAANG pays is being portrayed as something exceptionally great, but it does not mean they are paid right.
There seems to be a strong push back whenever the inadequate pay is discussed. How come companies can make exceptional profits that look like an anomaly, but at the same time won't pay the workers who created it?
Google's revenue per employee is 1.3 million annually. Netflix's is 2.3 million. Facebook's 1.5. Profit per employee runs even lower, Google's is 300K, Facebook's 400K, netflix's 250K.
That's after tricksy things that inflate those numbers, such as using a large number of contractors to decrease the employee count. I don't disagree that these companies could afford to pay more, but not like a ton more. Like, if they decided to put all profit toward workers, it would probably result in like...doubled salaries, which is a lot, but calling it a pittance is a reach.
There's all kinds of valid stuff to discuss in terms of companies paying people in weird ways: the abuse of non-engineers and especially vendors. The weird rules about locale-based pay. This one is weird mostly because the data doesn't bear you out as much as you seem to think it does. Especially when things like improving the conditions of TVCs and making them FTEs will further reduce that profit per employee margin (I believe it would put the profit per employee below 200K for all the companies I mentioned).
So like presuming that these companies start to treat the second-class people better, you're looking at a 20-30% raise for the swes. That's nice, don't get me wrong, but its not anything like the abuse you're making it out to be.
And who decides the split of profits vs. employee compensation? You? In most places it's the market. And these companies pay above market. Way above (double+) in most cases.
If you take this idea, and apply it to say McDonalds, the ratio of compensation for a worker vs. overall profit is much lower than tech companies. Take your soap box and apply it there vs. trying to rescue upper middle class workers with health insurance, houses, and retirement savings.
