What stopped you, who on average should be making around 40-60k a year and has a good amount of experience and expertise in your field of programming or computer science, from applying to Google, Facebook, or some sort of well established and high-paying (or high-er paying) position at a tech giant company?

My spider sense

I'm not sure I'd even want to work there.. Sure, these are famous names, big bucks and so,.. But aren't they too big for me? Wouldn't my impact be too insignificant in there? Would that still make me a happy employee...? I don't think so.

I don't want to take a pay cut

What stopped me working for the big guys? I have no interest in these companies to be an employee.

I would be lost in a maze of hundreds or thousands of devs rather then being at the forefront where my choices change the way a business/company operates.

What stopped me?
My morals.

Fun at work > salary

I don't think they would accept a 7h working day. Facebook and Apple especially are more cults than companies, and I actively avoid any of their "products". The application process alone would be a full-time job with a lot of work for most probably no return.

Also, I'm too male, too white and too old to be welcome there.

@Fast-Nop I'm also too white and too libertarian to be anything but hated by them. 🙄

@Root Oh yeah the thought police there is another factor, and it's a double bummer when combined with their disregard for privacy.

As @Root said, Morals. I consider most of the big, US based tech companies as mass surveillance parties (and the snowden leaks showed that quite some of them actually are, like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and such) and I'd simply fucking refuse working there.

@C0D4 same here. I work for a big company as a cloud engineer, but not a tech company. I'm on a team of four and our team is primarily responsible for EVERYTHING my company has put in the cloud (except email/Office 365, since they have their own team). We regularly make decisions and set up processes affecting hundreds of developers. I have the power to tell people (many of whom earn far more than I do) that they're not allowed to do something, and they'll listen to me because they don't have a choice.

At Google, I would be one of thousands of virtually-anonymous developers, working on a project that they'll probably kill in a couple of years, wondering whether anything I've accomplished actually matters. At my current employer, after only having this job for a year, I've already had a lasting impact on the organization.

I wanted to start my own "tech giant" lol
I didn't become a developer to become another developer ; I became one in order to leave a true legacy :D