The truth is that the vast majority of FAANG engineers making high six figures are only good at deterministic work. They cant produce new things, and so meta and google are struggling to compete when actual merit matters, and they cant just brute force the solutions. Inside these companies, the massive tech systems built, are actually generally terrible, but they pile on legions of engineers to fix the problems.

This is the culture of META hurting them, they are paying "AI VPs" millions of dollars to go to status meetings to get dates for when these models will be done. Meanwhile, deepseek r1 has a flat hierarchy with engineers that actually understand low level computing

Its making a mockery of big tech, and is why startups exist. Big company employees rise the ranks by building skill sets other than producing true economic value