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I find it surprising that people still consider FAANG prestigious, given that these companies collectively have probably 1-200,000 engineers in their employ. Ev
by centimeter 6y ago
I find it surprising that people still consider FAANG prestigious, given that these companies collectively have probably 1-200,000 engineers in their employ. Even if they managed to perfectly select for the cream of the crop (they don't), that still has to be like 10-20% of all programmers/engineers in the US. Being top 20% isn't that impressive, and in reality they're probably mostly hiring from the top 30-40%.
- whimsicalism 6y agoTop 20% of one of the most intellectually challenging jobs in America, also if you exclude Amazon it is not 20%.
- smabie 6y agoI really wouldn't consider most programming to be intellectually challenging. Certainly, most FAANG devs don't feel challenged in the least bit.
- akhilcacharya 6y agoExclude Amazon? What?
- yitianjian 6y agoBig size, low barrier to entry (especially at SDE-1 level) Source: work at Amazon
- akhilcacharya 6y agoI'm also an SDE1 at Amazon and find this extremely insulting, what the hell man
- whimsicalism 6y ago> find this extremely insulting, what the hell man I find it somewhat astonishing that you would be extremely insulted by the exclusion of your employer from some arbitrary acronym. It's well known that Amazon hiring standards are the lowest of FAANG, just like G's hiring standards are lower than N (as a whole). That doesn't mean that everyone who is an SDE1 at Amazon is less talented than everyone who is an L3 at Google, it's just different means.
- akhilcacharya 6y agoThe whole 20% comment makes me think you’re being a little disingenuous about the idea that we are not less talented.
- whimsicalism 6y agoI am not being at all disingenuous in any of the statements I'm making. The "20% comment" was the one above me, I was just responding to it. The average Amazon engineer is less talented than the average Google engineer. That is what I was saying. I wasn't making any claim about how talented you are or aren't!
- akhilcacharya 6y agoThe exclude amazon is the issue - I’m sorry but do you not see the contradiction in the last 3 sentences? When you make broad generalizations like that you’re also broadly calling people like me lesser. You realize that right?
- tudelo 6y agoYeah, that's something that I have been a bit confused on too. People talk about how hard it is and the "prestige", but there are 20k+ other engineers who did the same thing (at your company alone!). It's really not all that impressive.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThe relevant metric would be the ratio of how many got the position to how many wanted it.
- centimeter 6y agoNot really - that would inflate how impressive it is, because the bottom, say, 80% of the talent pool applies to avg 100 companies whereas the top 20% applies to avg 5 companies, so the number of talented applicants to a given company is very small. Just because you hire top 1% of people who apply to your company doesn't mean you hire top 1% of devs (even if your company is getting the best average applicants).
- scarmig 6y agoThere are amorphous borders between programmer, developer, and software engineer, but there are roughly ~4 million "programmers/engineers" in the USA. So call it ~5%?
- tudelo 6y agoI personally would consider top 5 percent of any task to be the low bar of proficiency, so even that doesn't seem super impressive to me. But damn, the jobs pay well and wlb can be great (or terrible). I guess the weird part is that the process of getting hired is so different than the day to day work.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago> I personally would consider top 5 percent of any task to be the low bar of proficiency, so even that doesn't seem super impressive to me. Top 5% among paid professionals is your low bar of proficiency?
- dustingetz 6y agothey're hiring the 40%-15% band. Top top band does not sling java for a living. Maybe there are some top programmers in the R&D orgs in areas like ML where the startup/resource costs are out of reach of an indie
- yitianjian 6y agoI would keep in mind that FAANG likely has a much higher percentage of international students and workers, which skews things a bit. It's definitely taking the top talent from all over the world, versus your small web shop in Cleveland, Ohio, hiring whoever it can get.
- throwaway713 6y agoYou’re looking at the wrong pool of potential employees. On my team of ~40 people, I am the only one who was born in the U.S. They hire from all over the world and will pay what’s necessary to import top talent from other countries. Also, 200,000 sounds way too high for total number of technical positions at these companies. There are a very large number of people working non-technical jobs there as well.