There's a lot of smart engineers who don't work for FAANG or will never work for FAANG, but your dismissal of engineers who work for FAANG as essentially bad engineers is completely wrong and insulting.
SWE at Google means you're good at interviewing, and that's it. There's a reason why Go was made, because, of of Rob Pike's own admission, most new devs at Google are dumbasses. There's all the half baked products, the dogshit APIs, all working on some internal ad software that runs in O(n^n^n) because who gives a shit, we're google, we have spares in our datacenter. The same applies to Facebook, that has hired up the wazoo and has basically led to a pass-the-interview culture. Passing the interview means you're good at remembering interview questions.
I do have some praise for Netflix engineers, mostly because they remain a small-ish team with insane talent, and Apple and Amazon I can't really speak for. But just like every company, they have mediocre and average software developers.
>most engineers DO want to work there
In the past, maybe. Nowadays, you're in a pretty massive bubble if you see people still interested in joining fucking Meta. Although I guess $400k TC would make me question my morals too.
I agree that FAANG engineers aren't necessarily the geniuses they hype themselves out to be, but making broad assertions needs some baseline aside from personal experience as my personal experience with FAANG engineers has been mostly positive. That's not to say non-FAANG engineers aren't competent either, as I have worked with non-FAANG engineers as well and they were perfectly fine.
The intent of the OP was simply to dismiss anyone working at FAANG and insinuate they were all subpar and average. He thinks you can just say "from my experience" and that just absolves him from any criticism of his statements. It's completely disingenous.
This statement says nothing about the average skill of a FAANG engineer. The bizarre extrapolation of statement A to fabricated statement B is quite astounding. Truly.
Love how you keep reiterating something is a fact without zero evidence.
The fact that is being considered a controversial statement is truly mind boggling to me.
It's pretty absurd that you continue to think you're somehow making a logical argument and somehow think your IQ is above 120.
> "The minimum threshold to get hired for FAANG is ~average talent and the willingness to grind"
> "Some average talent people work for FAANG"
> Thus, somebody who is average can get hired by FAANG
I said absolutely nothing about the skill distribution or histogram of talent across all of FAANG engineering.
Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.
That an untalented person can join FAANG does not say anything about the talent of the FAANG engineer on average.
An interview process threshold defines the left tail of the skill distributions of the hires, and tells you nothing about the shape of the distribution beyond that. Though you can likely assume it's normally distributed.
How many ways do I need to slice it for you?
> Though engineering at FAANG in general is overrated. Know plenty of underperforming people at my company that ended up there. All you needed in the past is ~average IQ and willingness to grind >
You have to be specific here, what do you mean "all you need"? Is this time to study algorithms? Because not everyone who studies algorithms, at the same rate, the same number of problems get an offer after an interview. Not only that, you're implying the interviews for other companies are exactly the same in regards to checking for IQ, which is completely laughable.
You simply assert that someone with average IQ that you know (and even underperformers) made it into FAANG, so you then broadly extrapolate, without evidence, that it means the selection criteria S for FAANG is simply a matter of if the person spends time studying and has an average IQ, and is no different than any under interviews.
Astounding.
Solid reasoning there.
> Anybody who's worked in the Bay Area has known a number of untalented people who have joined FAANG. That's reality. Believe whatever you want.
"Statistically and logically sound" lol
Nothing to see here works. Can't you see the obvious?
Edit: I too believe that FAANG engineers are not special but that belief is not proof of that statement.
> If plenty of average talent people get hired at FAANG (they do, from a statistically reasonably sized sample). Then being above average talent is not a minimum requirement for joining FAANG.
Where is the study or data on that? Just repeating things and sprinkling in terms "statistically reasonably sized sample" doesn't make it true. I know you want it to be true (and it may be true) but that is not evidence for that.
The other thing, of course, is that small companies can afford to be extremely judicious in a way that G/M can't (for example the old thing where Netflix only hired staff-equivalents). But I ultimately agree with you (like I said!) that at that point you're basically saying Google and Microsoft contain the below average engineers only from the index of current-and-former faang employees, which is sort of trivially true.
As for grind, idk I think it's good that my coworkers are below average grind. I am too. Wlb is good. Grind is unhealthy.
But then again none of this is as painful as using Xcode so I can't really complain.
Not quite true. As a hiring manager I lost several really good candidates to competing offers from Google. And these were strong engineers not only interviewing-wise.
It does not matter how good an engineer you are when you produce crap. There are great engineers working for 3 letter agencies and the result of their work is people going to jail or getting killed because they are against the official narative. See Assange for example.
What I said was self contained and factual, nothing more.
That hasn’t been my experience.
How on earth did you come to that conclusion?