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?
