The NSA does pay FAANG people FAANG salaries. It's just through private contractors, many of which you've never heard of.

Many of which you’ve never heard of.

Have you? Is this just public information I didn’t see? Or are starting a conversation with an impossible premise?

I also wouldn’t make assumptions.

That's the "royal you", not you individually.

If you go looking around on linkedin or crunchbase, you'll find numerous 10-50 employee defense contractors. Having known a few individuals employed this way, I would rank them as smart, capable, highly technical and easily capable of working at FAANG. They're getting comparable compensation/benefits with far less stress, and probably work on more interesting problems than the average Googler.

Some of L3's subsidiaries definitely recruit from HN