I did Google for ten years and I'd say this: SRE culture at Google is solid, with excellent skills and knowledge about how to build and run services at scale. Unfortunately it's mostly their own custom bespoke stuff, so those skills don't immediately translate into a new org. But they can.

SWE is more of a mixed bag. There are obviously incredibly bright people doing cutting edge software development at Google. But on the whole must of us were just doing very modest and incremental changes on protobuf shuffling super yak-shaved services that someone else had built the foundation of.

The transferrable and useful skills one gets out of someone trained in a FAANG is the ability to produce well explained tested well documented code incrementally and in a respectful and well discussed code review process.

The workplace culture stuff, again, mixed bag. Certainly to survive and thrive there, you needed to be thinking what to write about in perf twice a year, and it's such a constant that there were seminars and "how to get promoted" sessions where the whole self-promotional side of things was discussed in depth.