PSA: FAANG is not all glamour, it sucks

Hi I want to get job at offcampus Microsoft, I am cse-2024 passout unplaced. Tell me from scratch what all skills are required to crack Microsoft,what should all i have to do? (CP,DSA...etc? ) I am ready to work really super hard Please spare 2min time and comment it will help me a lot

Why do you want to work at FAANG? or Why do you not want to work at FAANG?

I have noticed that the best people from my college got into FAANGMULA companies and ultimately trashed their mind while making great money. Their tech development has literally grown slower than living in a buddhist monastery. Their stunted learning is a strict reminder of how people get trashed into bad engineers with good money. Ultimately you can't even switch companies because no one will hire you at your ZIRP salary while you can't even be 20% of your CTC in terms of productivity.

I can't seem to relate to much of the non-FAANG junta out there. I mean I have a cushy job with probably 0.1% pay of all SWEs(pretty much like all of us do). But these cookie-cutter roles have been taking a mental toll on me. Like I am getting paid but I feel a little purpose-less. What am I gunning for in this life? All my life I wanted to go to a good college to get into a good company. In college I wanted to get a good codeforces rank so that I could get into FAANG. Now that I am in FAANG I have nothing to look forward to. Any of you all feeling this way? Because I don't see myself offer-shopping and feeling much happy about that either.

Had a call with my cousin this weekend. Life has been very hectic lately so, I have been laying low for a while now. Anyway, my cousin reached out and he brought up something very interesting. He mentioned how the quality of new engineering grads at FAANG has been trending downwards over the last three or so years. Technical competency aside, there is a weird behavioural shift wherein freshers have adopted job hopping every 2-3 years. He told me that there are zero engineers who stayed longer than 3 years at his org. I mean optimizing for pay is fine. The thing to really balance for is impact in the long run because at one point you would find it hard to scale beyond a Lead/EM role at an org. But the real thing is that the "FAANG" hype has started to die down amongst the 99th percentile of talent. I wonder how long will it take to have a trickle down effect to 80th percentile and so on. Just to validate, I asked a friend for his opinion and he opined that "Bhai, tum FAANG mei naaukar ho ya kisi startup mei, ho toh naukar hi." Translation: "You can work at FAANG, or at a startup but you are still a servant(employee)" Is the FAANG hype really dead?

Disclaimer this is not a rant or this has nothing to put in bad way someones hard work. With so many ppl making tutorials and selling courses online, I had my few observations. I welcome ppl to join on this discussion with their point of views as well. The most important things is you need a solid company name on your resume, doesn’t matter what work you might have done there. Everyone knows the meatiest work in google is done at west coast office(just an example). This gives you the starting point, I would not disagree to the fact that these guys put on the hard work to crack the interviews, but that doesn’t mean you start selling a dream to everyone. It will be like what harshad mehta did to his clients during the days. If a person is working in some unknown company and even though the person teaches really well, I bet there will be hardly any takers for his/her course. Teaching is an art as per me, not everyone can be a great teacher. There are some good ones out there but majority of them don’t fall under above category. I would say they are social media influencers with a bit of tech knowledge. We have already lost a generation with rot learning and now with the rise of these ppl, the day is not far way when a person aceing the interview knows jack shit when given an actual problem to solve at workplace.

Hey viners, Have seen my friends doing DSA day and night to get into FAANG, it was their dream place to be at. But I have seen only SDE folks. Just curious to know, is the FAANG hype not for other tech roles like Data Science or non tech like Product Managers? Never seen any one grinding for Data Science and PM roles to get into FAANG. Shed some light.