It takes tens of thousands of engineers at FAANGs to...

do webmail...

doing IM takes one FAANG... 30 people?...

to replicate what non-technical local events communities did in posting shared calendars on PHP-driven solutions two+ decades ago...

to do what Wordpress does but costing much more per user than everyone in the world having their own Wordpress install...

to create a mobile OS while a basic working Ubuntu version on vastly diverse and undocumented hardware seems to be done by three people and a shoe...

to do advertising analytics...

to create advertising platforms...

to make users a product...

to discontinue products if they don't fit into productifying the user enough...

to make itself an indispensable solution by extinguishing anything not in its network of users as products scale...

...more?

If there's anything FAANGs do, that's actually good, it's employing people to make their advertising social environments online safe. But they seem to too often shirk that. And that's not a computer-technical job no matter how someone might want to pretend they can create a Bayes filter for it.

A person who both has a bias and a financial incentive to gatekeep told you they're better than the people they're trying to gatekeep? Color me shocked.

Well, most of the people who created the internet have never worked for a FAANG company, so ... no?

I'd actually say many Tier 1 talents would rather get a lower salary and work on higher risk/more creative projects in startups than get bored to death in these big companies that have for the most part stopped innovating.

Seems like a naive take. There are talented devs everywhere, but yes some difficult problems may only be tackled at FAANG. But then again, not all devs at FAANG work on hard problems, some are tweaking widgets all day. And at smaller companies a dev may need to work on the full breadth of a product, or be the only dev that can fix major issues - how exciting.

More often than not, what people say is a reflection of them not you. I’d expect the likely reason for the comment is simply for your friend to make them feel good about themself - their career.

Ignore it.

I often ask the same things about software developers who have never contributed to open source. It’s all bias. There is no baseline for competence in software.

lol. The phrase you're looking for is "full of himself". Don't get me wrong, when I was a Google, I worked with plenty of smart people. But Tier 1 talent not at a FANG is going to hear the horror stories of, eg, Google recruiting, and go off and found a startup that finds PMF and successfully IPOs instead.

For Jimmies? Maybe.