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Comment by johntiger1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a toxic mentality; getting hired at FAANG has very little to do with your "talent"

Talent is obviously subjective.

If you define talent as the criteria by which FAANG selects from a pool of employees - then you're by definition correct.

If you don't - then you disagree.

If FAANG is paying top dollar and selecting for trash - you have to wonder why, though.

I can't think of a more toxic mentality then thinking it doesn't. In what way do you think talent doesn't play a huge role?

The odd, perhaps not entirely coincidental, relationship between ivy league pedigree and job at FAANG. While there's a correlation between talent and ivy league the relationship is often tenuous. In my experience the difference between a new grad from MIT and a new grad from state school is almost zero in the professional world. Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to FAANG. This is not unusual. Look at Finance. However, to assert that "talent" plays a bigger role than pedigree is simply a falsehood refuted by the evidence.

I mean yes a lot of sub par metrics and proxies are used because people get really up in arms about using IQ tests; the best indicator Google ever found.

> Yet, one of these people have a fast pass to FAANG.

Citation? I haven't seen anything like that in the industry at all.

> ivy league pedigree and job at FAANG

I worked at FB and Amazon for six years total and the vast majority of my fellow engineers were from random mediocre schools (including myself, from the U. of Arizona).

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