FAANG companies offer a bunch of things: * Excellent pay * Good benefits * Stability * Prestige (looks good on resume/opens doors later) * Smart coworkers

FAANG companies offer a bunch of things: * Excellent pay * Good benefits * Stability * Prestige (looks good on resume/opens doors later) * Smart coworkers * Huge customer bases * Lots of internal transfer opportunities * Well established competence in handling foreign hires Now, obviously plenty of companies offer a lot of those things too...but not many offer all of them. And even then, often there's the visibility issue: maybe there's a bunch of ~200 person companies that do, in fact, offer the same things -- but will {Random Engineer X} actually be aware of that? With a company like Google, where I work, there's been enough written about it to have a decent idea of what you're getting into before you even apply. Discoverability is a bigger challenge with smaller companies.