FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and therefore they have a high floor, compared to say a startup that goes nowhere with the blind leading the blind, but the ceiling is also constrained by what projects you're working on. In terms of raw software engineering development there's probably no substitute for joining early in a hypergrowth scenario, because you'll have to solve way more problems in an efficient way, and understand the direct impact on the business in a way that is totally obscured when you come into a massive corporation with thousands of engineers. It's likely company growth will outpace your personal growth (hence the outside hires), but even so you will get challenged in ways that just don't exist in large, stable companies.