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Google's interview process requires two things:
1) That you're compliant
2) That you study.
Smart people can get by this filter, as long as they're compliant with less studying.
Average people can get by this with more studying.
Even if you're smart, you will be studying.
"Rockstars" can't get by this filter, which is probably the intent of the interview more than finding amazing engineers.
I think it's possible that you've attached a certain weight to illustriousness of FAANG, but it's an open conversation outside of FAANG that it's not hard for an engineer of 8-10y to get a job there, the question usually becomes: "Why would you want to".
As soon as you get to a certain level in tech, your primary financial needs are met completely and you start to see the shiny veneer of FAANG wearing off.
A lot of what makes them seem competent from the outside is the sheer volume of staff, 100k people can make a LOT of shiny documents and good ideas (the borg paper has definitely made me think of working there).
The veneer falls of Facebook first "Ew, they're scooping up all that data, gross!"
Then Amazon: "They treat people like slaves and everyone I know Ex-Amazon is a burnout"
Then Google: "Everything that isn't ad-tech is a toy, sure, they're rich but you live in a massive bubble.. also "Googliness" makes it sound like a cult"
For all of these you have the implicit knowledge that you're going to be a tiny cog and overall the bureaucracy will be insane.
Anyone who has pulled back the curtain on these companies knows that while the comp is good, the engineers aren't extraordinary just because they work there or work on "x scale problems".
In fact, most Google engineers taken out of Google are fucking useless, because they've developed a body of knowledge built entirely on systems that do not exist on the outside, many of which were developed many years ago to make hard problems simpler.
> In fact, most Google engineers taken out of Google are fucking useless, because they've developed a body of knowledge built entirely on systems that do not exist on the outside, many of which were developed many years ago to make hard problems simpler. >
Who is making this unpleasant? You critique a body of engineers, using biased personal anecdotes and no hard metrics, and think I am the one being negative and unpleasant? Insane.
1) I said that hiring has less to do about intelligence than compliance (which is what the parent was saying).
Do intelligent people work there? absolutely.
Does working for FAANG mean you are intelligent? No.
This is the distinction in which you seem to be confused. The interview process does not mean that everyone working in Google is smarter than anyone else, it just means (and in no uncertain terms) that you were willing to jump through hoops.
2) I stated that there are skills you learn inside google which are not relevant outside.
Google themselves know this, it's part of why their literature is littered with "in a google context" or "a problem exclusive to google's way of working".
For example: Piper, a centralised source code storage system is not available outside Google. Everyone uses Git, or, in the games industry they use Perforce (and you will quickly learn if you work in this context that the lush SCM tools that you're used to don't exist, there might be 1 person looking after perforce for an entire studio of 1,500 people -- if you are extremely lucky).
Blaze, the build tool which was open sourced as Bazel: Does not make sense to most engineering orgs and has very low penetration in the real world.
Monarch (and its query language) are exclusive to google.
Borg, has no corollary, Kubernetes is both completely different (borrowing a few ideas) and less mature at running most kinds of workloads. You would have to re-learn this.
The statement: "knowledge of these tools is not helpful outside" is absolutely correct.
Maybe there are some ideas that if you had 5 years to redesign you could build something. Similarly though, if you took a person from today and sent them 100 years into the past and they described a smart-phone.... well, you're no closer to actually having a smart phone.
I'm simply saying that most ex-Google employees will have to learn the tools used on the outside. In some cases they're going to be annoyed at not having certain conveniences.