Some perspective from the other side of this situation: I was a hiring manager at a company that paid well but not FAANG level. We had an office near a couple FAANG offices. We had a lot of applications from people who wanted out of FAANG.

Some problems we encountered when working with FAANG applicants and a few ex-FAANG hires:

* Non-transferable knowledge: Many of them had a lot of experience working within the abstractions and structures of their FAANG company, but struggled to work with foundational concepts once removed from their FAANG infrastructure. Some of them spent years trying to rebuild copies of the FAANG tooling they were familiar with just to accomplish jobs that didn't really need it.

* Experience mismatch with the current team. An extension of the above point: Some candidates were high level at FAANG but less experienced with day-to-day operations than our in-house Senior/Staff devs. This put us in an awkward spot where we'd have to pay them more than our current high level engineers to bring them in, but they'd be operating at a level below them at least to start. We opted to promote from within in these cases.

* Compensation cold feet. Many would tell us they just wanted out of their FAANG co at any cost and knew it would come with a compensation cut. But when it came down to offer time, they'd get cold feet about leaving money on the table. Even in cases where we paid within ~$50K of their FAANG comp, some of them just couldn't let it go when it came time to put in their 2 weeks' notice.

* Boomerang FAANG employees. Some people would join us, then miss the structure of blending into a big, highly structured FAANG company. They'd bounce back to the same FAANG or another FAANG within 6-18 months.

* Higher rate of candidate ghosting us than with any other cohort. It was rare for an average candidate to ghost us once the interview pipeline had started, but for whatever reason the FAANG applicants had a very high rate of getting half way through the pipeline and then disappearing without a word. Many times they'd appear again a few months later asking for a second chance, only to repeat the process.

I'm not suggesting these apply to you. Only trying to provide some perspective. Anything you can do to alleviate these concerns early might help an application process.

Of course, if your goal is to secure FAANG level compensation and Staff+ titles, you might just have to accept the reality that continuing in FAANG is far and away the easiest way to get there.