I agree, this was the biggest striking difference I saw between the engineering workforces at FAANG companies vs "everywhere else". You'll encounter a similar percentage of geniuses and top performers at both types of companies. You'll see plenty of regular 1X to 2X engineers, too. But somehow the FAANGs have, for the most part, figured out how to filter out the programmers who literally cannot program, whereas many other companies have not. You'll never see The Brilliant Paula Bean [1] at FAANG, but you will encounter them once in a while pretty much everywhere else.