The other consideration is that pretty much every company you could work for as a software developer is going to try to take advantage of your work. Most companies are morally bad at best and morally terrible at worst. If you discourage any good person from working there, the problem will only snowball from there.
If working at FAANG gives you the resources to support things you’re passionate about, and you’re willing to stand up for your values when they do something bad, there isn’t a problem with that IMO.
You can work in bioinformatics, the pay is lower than FAANG, but your code will benefit society.
Benefit society, or go to support a pharmaceutical company that will in some way benefit society in exchange for making a few people rich?
No ethical consumption working conditions under capitalism.
FAANG is just as exploitative if not more than the average in the industry.
My point wasn’t that FAANG isn’t exploitative (my bad if it came off that way, I didn’t mean for that), it’s that everywhere else is also exploitative to some degree (most probably less so than FAANG, there are definitely a few that are worse though), and that it could still be reasonable to work there for some people.
