I worked at a startup where everyone was ex meta! They made such a shitty architecture with GraphQL and Hasura and other meta technologies they learnt that it was laughable they were using that for a small startup.

It's not that there aren't great engineers at the FAANGs. It's that there are a lot of low quality ones. So it's a poor lake to fish in.

At what kind of company? Looking from outside and in particular from outside the US the whole FAANG culture seems very strange. There is - or was - a huge amount of money available in compensation that seems almost completely disconnected from the value of an individual developer's contribution to the business or the level of useful skills and experience the developer has. And it seems there's this kind of clique effect where those who have worked in a FAANG or a high-profile startup are assumed by others who have worked at FAANGs or high-profile startups to be somehow better than everyone else. But IME once you're outside that bubble a more likely assumption is that ex-FAANG people will demand more than they're worth and won't necessarily be any more competent or productive than anyone else. And ex-multiple-FAANGs with rapid job hopping at the start of a career is a huge red flag.

Not to mention the entire disciplines of engineering that really only exist at the megacorps - Meta is still on the relatively bleeding edge of datacenter design, both physical plant and networking.