Honestly, if your hiring criteria involves looking at pedigree, you're probably doing it wrong. FAANG people jump over to the startup side and vice versa all th

Honestly, if your hiring criteria involves looking at pedigree, you're probably doing it wrong. FAANG people jump over to the startup side and vice versa all the time. People grow (yes, even those $500k/yr staff folks). Rather than looking at the company names, you probably want to look at the quality of the work your candidates did. Was there manager-level experience, did it involve dev ops, was there evidence of growth progression, etc. This sort of stuff matters more.