I've worked at FAANG, yes, as well as one of the top two frontier AI labs, quant, and now, in a similar role doing very technical research.
Do you not think it's considered "elite" to e.g. work at such companies in highly technical roles in the same way that a PhD at Stanford is considered "elite"? As a holder of the latter, I do. If not, what would you consider an "elite" team?
Maybe you think the statement was pretentious, but your response: "I hope you don’t call your average FAANG and adjacent “elite” - that's sad" is, truly, the most pretentious thing I've ever read on this site. So I'll ask: what do you consider elite?
Yes I’ve worked at FAANG and the average mid level or even senior developer is not that impressive. Anyone with time on their hands and a decent proficiency can grind enough leetCode to get in.
Not that I did personally, I came in in the internal cloud consulting division (yes a full time blue badge, RSU earning employee).
You know then while all developers have to work at scale. Most of the work is built on pre-existing scalable components.
There are 1 million developers+ possibly if you count all of the FAANG + adjacent developers. I’ve nope a few of them during interviews after I left because I knew they couldn’t handle not being coddled by BigTech and wouldn’t know what to do with ambiguous requirements , an empty AWS account (even if they worked at AWS) and empty git repo.
But back to the point, they very much treated their job as a just a way to earn money and RSUs. They would have been a fool to treat a company as toxic as Amazon as anything else.
Yes I knew what I was getting into going in. I was a 46 and it was my 8th job out of college. I made my money, made connections, put it on my resume and moved on
These days? Quant, AI employees who have 2 commas in their yearly salaries, etc.
It’s not random mid level developer at a FAANG who “grinded leetCode” or even a senior developer who memorized “Designing Data Intensive Applications”.
You really didn’t think I was some 22 year old posting on r/cscareerquestions who was mesmerized by people “working at a FAANG” did you? For me it was just my 8th job out of now 10 and just another way to exchange labor for money.
And if you think that is normal, it’s honestly kind of sad.