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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure about this.

Wanting to work at FAANG is basically the olympics of IT, and people still try to do it all the time.

This seems way off. The number of engineers working at FAANG is in the hundreds of thousands, an athlete that is 100000th best in the world is basically a hobbyist rando.

It's all relative. There are more professional software engineers than professional weight lifters. The top 1% work at FAANG, the top 1% go to the olympics.

The whole Olympic roster for the US is ~500 people. There's half a million people who are current NCAA athletes, that's an order of magnitude off right there, even after excluding football and before counting in the actual pros.

This example kind of falls apart with respect to the Olympics for an array of reasons. If you're looking at NCAA athletes, lots of those sports are not represented in the Olympics. Also, because spots in the Olympics are limited, the "best" person isn't always chosen to represent a given country for a given sport.

>If you're looking at NCAA athletes, lots of those sports are not represented in the Olympics.

Not really, just football and lacrosse. On the other hand, there're many Olympic events that are not a part of the NCAA.

>Also, because spots in the Olympics are limited, the "best" person isn't always chosen to represent a given country for a given sport.

I don't think this is particularly important on average. I'm just giving a quick and dirty lower bound here to put things into perspective.

> I don't think this is particularly important on average. I'm just giving a quick and dirty lower bound here to put things into perspective.

...how? "This person did nothing wrong and still did not make it to the olympics". That's literally what we're debating?

This thread is clearly about comparing the probabilities of getting into FAANG vs getting into the Olympics. The situation with varying relative competitiveness of the local "scene" in a particular country is the same in both cases, despite the fact that even the 1% figure for FAANG engineers would only work under the assumption of the global pool of candidates (~20 mil software engineers worldwide), all willing to relocate and prioritizing FAANG above all other employers (a lot of assumptions). Tldr: no, being kinda good at leetcode is not an Olympic-level feat, try the ICPC.

You're kinda just...debating with yourself. Your TLDR isn't anything even remotely close to anything I ever said or suggested. Equating everyone in the NCAA to every professional software engineer is super silly; it'd be a better comparison to say the entire NCAA and everyone that took a coding class sometime in their education.

If you scroll up you'll find this discussion is about luck vs. hard work. I'll be stepping out of this specific comment thread now though. Enjoy your night.

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