"Just simply get a competitive job offer from the revolving doors of the top-10 top-paying companies and you won't see a 3x increase" is absolutely true, but only useful if you're talking about employees of these revolving door companies. If your getting a TC of 180k at a startup that gave you options of no value, and you score a high enough position at AMZN (as apparently this ex-colleague of mine did), then seeing total comp over 4 years exceeding 550k/year—while perhaps not the norm—is totally possible.
It could be argued that $180k is not a fair number to judge a 3x increase on for the reason you state, but it is what it is, this is a real salary that real people get paid. Not everybody flocks to FAANG as their first career move.
The whole point is if you're getting a TC of 180k at a startup and Amazon offers you 550k/year, Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google are all likely to do similar numbers.
You don't have to already be working at one.
In fact a good number of companies are likely to be closer to 550k/year than 180k since they're also aware they need to compete with FAANG offers.
-
Meanwhile Amazon is not particularly easier to join than the rest of FAANG (modulo the specific team), they're not particularly more prestigious than the rest of FAANG, the work is not particularly more exciting than the rest of FAANG... meanwhile the culture aspect is a huge negative outlier.
Amazon almost has this cartoonish level of negativity hovering over it ever since things like URA and Focus have slowly come out to actually as real things... between all that and the on-call and the general work you'll be doing, it's just not an amazing choice.
It could be argued that $180k is not a fair number to judge a 3x increase on for the reason you state, but it is what it is, this is a real salary that real people get paid. Not everybody flocks to FAANG as their first career move.