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How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job if they apply? It's a free pass? Your sam

How many FAANG companies are there? I guess five from the name. Does every black applicant with a CS degree get a job if they apply? It's a free pass? Your sample size of five elite companies can't be taken as a serious attempt to describe the actual experience of black CS grads applying for jobs.

throwaway556677 5y ago
A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.
- astura 5y ago
  What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.
simonh 5y ago
The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.
- tchaffee 5y ago
  Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world. So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%. (Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches). Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.

throwaway556677 5y ago

A charitable (and, I think, reasonable) reading would be that the poster used FAANG as a representation of the overall trend in tech. FAANG are what the rest of the industry aspires to be, after all.

tchaffee 5y ago
How many CS jobs are even in the "the industry" though? Home Depot, Walmart, and Nestle are examples of massive companies that do not aspire to be Facebook or anything like it, but who hire lots of software engineers. Most companies are not tech companies, although a handful of tech giants have done very well.
astura 5y ago
What's "tech?" Large VC funded B2C companies get a lot of press and are most well known but I'd imagine most software engineering jobs are either at "non-tech" companies or companies that provide B2B services.

simonh 5y ago

The top 5 have recruited over a million people between 2000 and 2018. That's an average of about 50,000 new recruits per year. Not all of those are in engineering of course, and those are global numbers, but still they hire tens of thousands of engineers every year. Here in the UK local software companies constantly complain that the cream of every year's CS grads emigrate to the US.

tchaffee 5y ago
Doing the rough math, Google employs about 80,000 engineers today. Generously assuming the other FAANGs employ as many engineers, you get about 400,000 engineers. There are about 26 million software engineers in the world. So that's 1.5% of all engineers. And that's being very generous. The real number is surely below 1%. No surprise that the most desirable companies hire the top 1%. (Happy for someone to correct my numbers and the resulting percentage - it's based on a few Google searches). Unless my numbers are way off, it's safe to say that over 99% of engineers in the world are not working at a FAANG. I stand by my claim that we should not be using what happens at FAANGs as reliable anecdotal evidence of the interview experience for most candidates.