Do you even like playing basketball? Do you just see the money and the lifestyle and think "ok that sounds good, how do I get that"?
I think these are the wrong questions to be asking.
There’s like 550 NBA players. There’s what, like 10,000 engineers at Google alone?
A person who leetcodes their way to Amazon isn’t in the same universe of comparative-skill-level as the 11th man on an NBA bench.
None the less I think it gets the point across that just because you can program doesn't mean you can work at a FAANG. Similarly, just because you're good enough to play high school varsity doesn't mean you can get to the NBA.
This is orders of magnitude less true than the high school varsity and NBA comparison.
If someone can program well enough to be paid by someone to do it and is driven enough, I’d bet that they can get a FAANG offer at some point in their lives. Most people will fail at the drive part.
There is no level of drive that allows 99.9% of high school varsity starters to take off their warmups at a D1 university program, let alone the NBA. It will never ever ever ever happen.
Basically, you are born with the required genetics + surrounded with the right coaching from a very early age or you won't get into the NBA right?
Are there other factors you think contribute? What percentage weight would you put on each factor if you had to guess.
I think you're likely correct here. There's definitely exceptions to this, but those exceptions fit into the 99.9% figure you have here.
There are a lot of engineers that cannot pass even basic warmup questions and probably never will be able to.
Aka, I'd argue that elon musk drive gives you a greater chance to become an L8 engineer, where as elon musk drive may make you an NBA player, but at a significantly lower chance.
To actually build up the resume and skills of the craft, I would invest and contribute to popular, widely used Open Source projects that have an active community, conferences, mailing lists and the like.
This will take a lot of investment, but having non trivial contributions to core software many companies use is often a better resume tick than an internship or experience at a no name company.
I had multiple well known, non FAANG big tech engineers invite me to come interview after they saw my contributions to some larger Open Source projects.
Then, passing the interview is another story, but there are many paid and unpaid resources to guide you through that process.