You should do it, man. People read a Google Zero blog post or something and think "Oh I'm not on their level", when the reality is far different. I think it's

You should do it, man. People read a Google Zero blog post or something and think "Oh I'm not on their level", when the reality is far different. I think it's mostly hard work, infrastructure, and experience that lets people accomplish amazing stuff at these giant companies. Sure, you need some baseline level of smarts, but it isn't some obscene 1/1000 genius. I'd be willing to bet that at least a quarter of all programmers are smart enough to work at FAANG and make 300-600k. Interview/Leetcode problems are a lot like mystery novels or sudoku puzzles. Once you know the basic building blocks (data structures, algorithms, sneaky tricks) they're hard but not THAT hard. Google's a bit of a different beast from the rest of the FAANG companies. They take it as a baseline assumption that you can easily crank through a super hard coding question, and throw a wrench into it while you're working on it. IMO it's still doable to pass the bar though. After a couple of years in big tech and exposure to the tricks of the trade, you too will be able to do stuff that blows people's minds. Such as quit to take a 75% pay cut for a job that's personally meaningful