> Every time I see an anecdote like this, A it reaffirms my belief that FAANG devs are fairly mediocre on the whole

I think another (partially causal?) problem is how they're managed. The whole perf circus is just ridiculous, especially the stuff recently reported about facebook. But they're all more or less like that. Steeped in that cocktail of incentives, who even knows what might happen to an otherwise excellent engineer.

But also just numerically, they can't be much above average, on average, because there are so many.