I have also worked in multiple different sized companies, including FAANG, and multiple countries. My assessment is that FAANGs tend to select for generally intelligent people who can learn quickly and adapt to new situations easily but who nowadays tend to be passionless and indifferent to anything but money and prestige. Personally I think passion is the differentiator here, rather than talent, when it comes to doing a good job. Passion means caring about your work and its impact beyond what it means for your own career advancement. It means caring about building the best possible products where “best” is defined as delivering the most value for your users rather than the most value for the company. The question is whether big tech is unable to select for passion or whether there are simply not enough passionate people to hire when operating at FAANG scale. Most likely it’s the latter.

So I guess I agree with both you and the parent comment somewhat in that in general the bar is higher at FAANGs but at the same time I have multiple former colleagues from smaller companies who I consider to be excellent, passionate engineers but who cannot be lured to big tech by any amount of money or prestige (I’ve tried). While many passionless “arbitrary metric optimizers” happily join FAANGs and do whatever needs to be done to climb the ladder without a second thought.

I sort of agree and disagree. I wouldn't agree with the idea that most FAANG engineers are not passionate by nature about their work.

What I would say is that the bureaucracy and bullshit one has to deal with makes it hard to maintain that passion and that many end up as TC optimizers in the sense that they stay instead of working someplace better for less TC.

That said, I am not sure how many would make different choices. Many who join a FAANG company don't have the slightest inkling of what it will be like and once they realize that they are tiny cog in a giant machine it's hard to leave the TC and perks behind.