Landing a job at either Facebook or Amazon is an unachievable dream for most people so I have a hard time to feel sorry for anyone here. In their position they can get any job they want.
Working at FAANG is easily regarded as one of the higher end jobs in the SWE world (from comp and prestige) and does generally require you to be in the top % of people who know how to code. That much is fairly indisputable so unachievable is a good way to put it for most folks (even if they are into programming already)
It's really not. There's thousands and thousands of engineers, from mediocre to truly great. With the right preparation, a lot of it just comes down to getting lucky with who interviews, how they're feeling that day, etc -- luck.
You might find this interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0
You can't get in without both luck and preparation. That part I won't deny, but most exclusive things in life involve that bit of luck since everyone starts to hit the "threshold" of qualifications pretty fast
No, you cannot say the same thing about Ivy League admissions, at least not at the current point in time. Ivy League has a massive supply of qualified candidates to fill the demand (aka the fixed number of seats they have) many many times over. Tech companies don't have that luxury. They have a lot of candidate supply, but the "qualified" candidate supply is much more difficult to come by.
Ivy League admission officers admitted multiple times in public interviews and public statements that there are a lot of people that would qualify and succeed at those schools just fine, but the schools have very limited numbers of seats, so they have to have the bar be set higher and higher in order to accommodate truly the "best" (based on whatever metrics they use to determine the best).
With FAANG? They are desperate to hire good engineers. As someone who interviewed candidates at one of them, for every single interview I went with the mindset that I want to hire that person, as long as they demonstrate they are competent enough to do the job. There is no such thing as "limited" number of spots (as it is with Ivy League admissions). If every single candidate we interview is qualified, we will hire every single one of them, we won't be artificially raising the bar just to accommodate a specific X number of people because we cannot fit more. We can. Of course, my specific team cannot hire 50 people, but if all 50 candidates are competent, we will try to set them up with one of our sister teams or any other team in the company that desperately needs engineers, and there are tons of those teams.
The real problem is that a lot of those people we interview tend to not even be able to do fizzbuzz, and I am not exaggerating. I used to think that people said that statement as a joke back then, but after interviewing enough candidates, I realized that they weren't kidding.
TL;DR: they aren't similar, because Ivy League has a fixed number of seats available, and even if every candidate is qualified, they can only accommodate a predetermined number of them, so they have to artificially raise the cutoff metrics. For every candidate my team interviews, we can easily hire every single one of them if they are competent, without artificially raising the bar just to have a fixed number of hires.
You have to be capable and interested in passing a FAANG interview. Presumably those that failed the FAANG interview process are either incapable or uninterested. My money says it's mostly the former.
You have to pass-as what FAANG deems as the top 1%. Most people don't.
AND I am only talking about the algorithm and behavioral parts of the interview and working on the assumption that I will pass any general questions on system design, ML, etc.
Other than the CS degree, you are also make a 130+ IQ assumption here.
1. IQ is going to be in the 120-130 range for MIT and other FAANG target schools (https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx and factor in the GPA necessary and those correlations). If you are NOT from those schools, you are less competitive and have more to catch up on (like me). Whatever you say, either you had a lot of study free time or your IQ is higher than you think, as IQ translates directly to learning speed, especially on computer-related tasks.
2. Big deal. For a young student out of school? No, it's the rational choice, though a lot of people out of school/college NEED to work to keep the bills paid. For older people - dedicating a good 3-4 hours a day is going to lead them to underperform at work (at least it would for me), so it's kind of a big risk.
The pay increase is also "debatable", arguments like COL, vesting, decrease in quality of life due to commute, relatively-high (by non-FAANG) standards salary, taxes, etc come up. And that's without mentioning potential kids.
There is a reason that most people do not work at FAANG.
And I want to echo a point filoleg made. You don't need to be the top 1%. It's not like Ivy League school acceptance where they are artificially throwing people out. FAANG is dying to hire. My team has been trying to hire multiple people for months and we have gotten exactly 0. Every hiring manager goes into interviews wanting to say yes and the requirements are extremely clear and manageable for anyone willing to put in the time.