Within FAANG, there is again tri-modal distribution. There are people who are hanging in there in IC roles for 15 years and then they are new comers straight out of school with PhD in deep learning and multiple competing offers. Both groups make approximately same money. Then there is upper management layer who have gotten promoted well beyond their competence by jumping internally and externally and they make 5X of everyone else.
Truth to be told, vast majority of FAANG population doesn’t make those fairytale money.
However, an IC @ Google outside the US still makes 2-3x what their local employment market will pay even without playing all careerist & promo games.
Source: was IC @ Google.
Frankly I've accumulated the cynical opinion that Google wants to asphyxiate the local job markets of talent. They need to do this to keep their lead in advertising, etc., and they can afford to do it because of their lead. Paying 2x what local employers pay stops many local employers (usually underfunded by anemic local investment culture) from firing up some fancy new ad-tech startup or whatever.
This has always been case long before Google. Interestingly, this has never prevented new startups to born and compete. When Google was shaping up, they didn’t went after hiring people in established companies. They went after people who no one knew but they can tell that they were phenomenal talent. This hidden talent, the underdogs, are always floating around and wasting away. All successful startups builds off of them. Before Google, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Gemawat were two nobody working in D.E.C. Labs, not some highly paid Principal Engineer at Yahoo or Microsoft.
The single most important skill of a startup founder is to identify these underdogs and convince them to basically work for free. There is always tantalizing similarity between how one person raised small but highly talented armies in ancient time and went onto defeat large established kingdoms.
No one goes from zero to billions but the market could use another advertising channel and if it converts better and has the inventory it's an easy sale. Getting the inventory is the bigger problem.. you cannot compete with the inventory of youtube, search and adsense with a better ad tech alone unless you create something where inventory isn't an issue.
I've been an IC at a company providing IC services to small companies in the buildings next to FAANG HQs. I've worked as an IC designer, have been involved in a lot of IC (obviously) and I also have several years of experience in IC. So clearly, ic wot ppl mean when they type IC.
As an IC on various forums for over a decade, I've only started commonly seeing this abbreviation in the past 2 years.
It's an amusing term for sure and definitely an outcropping of the internals at FAANG (or maybe MS as well) culture. Like, it almost sounds denigrating. "I was just an individual contributor"; like, the people who do the real work, y'know, they're out there doing the difficult work of herding cats to tell them which protobufs to move from A to B, while the ICs are, y'know just ICing doing the actual protobuf shuffling :-)
It's just about promo culture @ Google, etc. and not in fact I think a reasonable principle of how good software gets built.
At Google specifically, the term simply refers to someone who does not have formal people management responsibilities. (For example, if I were a tech lead on a major project but did not have any reports, I'd refer to myself as an IC.)
Also, there's no stigma: it's a completely neutral term.
Truth to be told, vast majority of FAANG population doesn’t make those fairytale money.