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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

I find it surprising that people still consider FAANG prestigious, given that these companies collectively have probably 1-200,000 engineers in their employ. Even if they managed to perfectly select for the cream of the crop (they don't), that still has to be like 10-20% of all programmers/engineers in the US. Being top 20% isn't that impressive, and in reality they're probably mostly hiring from the top 30-40%.

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You’re looking at the wrong pool of potential employees. On my team of ~40 people, I am the only one who was born in the U.S. They hire from all over the world and will pay what’s necessary to import top talent from other countries.

Also, 200,000 sounds way too high for total number of technical positions at these companies. There are a very large number of people working non-technical jobs there as well.

Yeah, that's something that I have been a bit confused on too. People talk about how hard it is and the "prestige", but there are 20k+ other engineers who did the same thing (at your company alone!). It's really not all that impressive.

The relevant metric would be the ratio of how many got the position to how many wanted it.

Not really - that would inflate how impressive it is, because the bottom, say, 80% of the talent pool applies to avg 100 companies whereas the top 20% applies to avg 5 companies, so the number of talented applicants to a given company is very small. Just because you hire top 1% of people who apply to your company doesn't mean you hire top 1% of devs (even if your company is getting the best average applicants).

There are amorphous borders between programmer, developer, and software engineer, but there are roughly ~4 million "programmers/engineers" in the USA. So call it ~5%?

I personally would consider top 5 percent of any task to be the low bar of proficiency, so even that doesn't seem super impressive to me. But damn, the jobs pay well and wlb can be great (or terrible). I guess the weird part is that the process of getting hired is so different than the day to day work.

> I personally would consider top 5 percent of any task to be the low bar of proficiency, so even that doesn't seem super impressive to me.

Top 5% among paid professionals is your low bar of proficiency?

I would keep in mind that FAANG likely has a much higher percentage of international students and workers, which skews things a bit. It's definitely taking the top talent from all over the world, versus your small web shop in Cleveland, Ohio, hiring whoever it can get.

they're hiring the 40%-15% band. Top top band does not sling java for a living. Maybe there are some top programmers in the R&D orgs in areas like ML where the startup/resource costs are out of reach of an indie

Top 20% of one of the most intellectually challenging jobs in America, also if you exclude Amazon it is not 20%.

I really wouldn't consider most programming to be intellectually challenging. Certainly, most FAANG devs don't feel challenged in the least bit.

Probably because most are doing glorified CRUD, but with an absurd barrier to entry (the interview process).

Startup interviews are just as tough these days.

Exclude Amazon? What?

Big size, low barrier to entry (especially at SDE-1 level)

Source: work at Amazon

I'm also an SDE1 at Amazon and find this extremely insulting, what the hell man

> find this extremely insulting, what the hell man

I find it somewhat astonishing that you would be extremely insulted by the exclusion of your employer from some arbitrary acronym.

It's well known that Amazon hiring standards are the lowest of FAANG, just like G's hiring standards are lower than N (as a whole). That doesn't mean that everyone who is an SDE1 at Amazon is less talented than everyone who is an L3 at Google, it's just different means.

The whole 20% comment makes me think you’re being a little disingenuous about the idea that we are not less talented.

I am not being at all disingenuous in any of the statements I'm making.

The "20% comment" was the one above me, I was just responding to it.

The average Amazon engineer is less talented than the average Google engineer. That is what I was saying. I wasn't making any claim about how talented you are or aren't!

The exclude amazon is the issue - I’m sorry but do you not see the contradiction in the last 3 sentences? When you make broad generalizations like that you’re also broadly calling people like me lesser. You realize that right?

Do you even math ? That's not how on average works ?

How is it not how an average works? They haven't exactly demonstrated that the average is lowered by significantly less talent on the low end, so I'm here assuming they mean everyone at Amazon is just slightly less talented. Any other view is just charity.

It's insulting, and I'm glad they were downvoted for it.

You might be the best engineer at Amazon better than 90% of Googlers. Your peers may bring your average down. Notice how you come ahead in this scenario. Amazon pays less, less perks, backloads equity as handcuffs. There is a reason top talent decides to go elsewhere.

Please don't disrespect my peers like that.

> There is a reason top talent decides to go elsewhere

In what way are we not top talent? Cite examples.

You were downvoted as well. Why don't you just transfer to FANG if "brand" is important to you ? Saying you work for Amazon isn't going to impress your friends and relatives.

> Saying you work for Amazon isn't going to impress your friends and relatives.

Do you have any proof of this?

Your insecurity on every thread here. See a non tech person's reaction when you see someone saying they work for Google vs Amazon.

He doesn't understand stats. Don't worry about it.

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