title: "Why I'm not chasing FAANG (and where I think frontend talent is actually moving)" slug: 'not-chasing-faang-where-talent-moves' date: '2026-04-19' excerpt: "The default career advice for senior engineers is wrong for at least half the people receiving it." tags: ['career', 'big-tech', 'startup'] category: 'Career' published: true
The default career advice for senior engineers in 2025 still goes something like: "stack credibility, get to FAANG, comp matures." It works. It's been working for two decades. I don't have anything against it.
I'm also not doing it.
Part of this is personal — I have a family, I live in Tempe, I have side projects I care about — but part of it is reading where the field is going, and I think the FAANG default is a worse bet in 2026 than it was in 2018, and I think the best frontend engineers I know are quietly betting elsewhere.
Three things have shifted that the default career advice hasn't fully absorbed:
One. The compensation ceiling at non-FAANG companies is closer to FAANG than it used to be. Five years ago a senior at FAANG made roughly twice what a senior at a Series-C startup made. Today the gap is more like 30-40% and the startup compensation is more loaded toward equity that occasionally hits. The marginal return on chasing FAANG comp has compressed. Not eliminated. Compressed.
Two. The interesting work has decentralized. The infrastructure-scale problems FAANG used to be uniquely positioned to solve are now solvable by smaller teams using the same tools. The problems that ARE uniquely interesting at FAANG are research-flavored, and most of those are concentrated in a few teams that are very hard to get on. The median FAANG engineering job is pretty similar to the median Series-B engineering job in 2026. It's just bigger.
Three. The skill development curve at smaller companies is faster. This was always true. What's changed is how steeply true it is. At a 30-person startup you're going to touch infra, design, product, customer support — within a year. At a FAANG you're going to specialize. Specialization compounds well over decades. Generalization compounds well in a market where junior engineers are increasingly augmented by AI tooling and the marginal value of "I can ship the whole thing alone" is rising.
The places I think frontend talent is actually concentrating in 2026:
Mid-stage product companies that take design seriously. Companies in the $50M-$500M revenue range where the founder still has opinions about the marketing site. The work is shipping things real users use, the bar is high, the team is small enough that good engineers move the needle.
Vertical SaaS where the moat is operational, not technical. Healthcare, legal, government services. Less glamorous than the consumer companies. More durable. The frontend complexity is real because the workflows are real. The companies pay seniors well because they have to.
Solo or small-team SaaS founders who are also engineers. This is its own track and it's the one I'm closest to. Not for everyone — most engineers shouldn't run a SaaS — but for the engineers who can, the leverage on a senior skillset is uncapped.
Where I'd be cautious in 2026:
- Ad-tech and crypto continue to consume engineering talent and produce outcomes that are middling on the median.
- Pure AI companies — meaning, companies whose entire business is "we trained a model" — concentrate around a small number of winners. Most of the second-tier ones won't make it, and the engineering interview-to-offer ratio is brutal.
I'm not trying to talk anyone out of FAANG. The path is real and I have friends who are happy on it. I AM saying that "FAANG is the obvious move" is no longer accurate, and the alternative paths have improved enough that the second-best option in 2018 is more like the equally-good option in 2026.
If you're a senior engineer wondering what's next: there are more good answers now than there used to be. That's good news.