Don’t forget choosing projects purely for the promotion folder and ignoring existing work if at all possible.

I worked at Google for 7 years, admittedly a decade ago. We didn't grind leetcode, We didn't jump through mindless hoops, and we had almost 0 bureaucracy. So for at least that letter in the acronym it was nothing like you describe.

I too go to dinner and expect to pay with the pearl I find in my oyster. FAANG are relatively merit based jobs that pays exceptionally above band and a lot of people try to get into them. The jobs are scarce, sure there is more talent, but you basically are getting insurance on candidate quality.. Saying I'd rather hire someone who comes from something much more statistically unlikely and even harder to do due diligence.

My experience is opposite to what you described. I got into faang with minimal leetcode grind and didn't have to jump many hoops. The career move not only removed the unnecessary bureaucracy from my daily activities and tools, but also finally gave me actually challenging problems to work on. I suppose it's always a matter of perspective, but I'd wager 90% of work at 90% of startups doesn't equate rocket science. When looking for a startup to work for, you have to filter out a lot of bad ones and the balance between difficult and impossible can be hard to strike. If you have a good idea and a decent skillset founding can be impressive, but generally I've found faang engineers to seem more apt than most people I've met at/seen in startups, with the exception of 1-2 superstars per startup.

+ Google Maps

Maps, android and its ecosystem (play store, etc.), cloud, nest, gmail & google docs. All those have a significant market.