FAANGs hire generalists. Speaking as someone with experience at 2 FAANGs, the entry bar to some of them is not as high as people make it to be. The whole point

FAANGs hire generalists. Speaking as someone with experience at 2 FAANGs, the entry bar to some of them is not as high as people make it to be. The whole point of a generalist is to be that jack of all trades that management can just throw into any "high priority" project to get it shipped. These corporations are so big now that they've mostly wrapped all the existing tools or have developed their own, so the only skill you need is to learn a bunch of custom tools (with little documentation) sufficiently fast to be productive. So just learn the basic algorithms to pass the interview and then proceed to (probably) never use that knowledge at your FAANG job. If you're on the older side, don't think about it. I personally know someone who's 65 working at a FAANG (anecdata but still). If you interview with a kid, they might ding you for "culture fit" because they're kids, but hopefully the hiring manager and the bar raisers are mature enough to see past that. Your biggest hurdle will be the internal interviewer discussion that based on your experience you should be at level X, and, if in your interview you didn't show that level, that you might be unhappy at X - 1 or X - 2.