As a more rural-living SW dev, my general impression is that if you work for Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., then you are the 'best of the best' - akin to something like admittance to Harvard compared to a state school, for example. How true is this?
It doesn't really mean anything actually, but you verses the 'competition' depends on your public profile as a software engineer and how you market yourself.
There are devs who joined FAANG because of their knowledge in their small beginnings in open-source software and their contributions. They get straight offers if they are well known in their communities if they switch jobs. For them, it is no contest.
For the rest of us coming from a bootcamp/university/self-taught, it is the Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility/Data Structures and Algorithms route since they assume everyone else is an unknown dev.
Sorry to break it to you, but as far as my friends at those companies keep telling me, it is completely rigged in favor towards famous programmers.*
* Unless you have serious open-source projects used by large companies in production and you present them in a conference/meetup/etc, which is the EASIEST way to get a referral/offer via an engineer from a FAANG company IMHO.
There are devs who joined FAANG because of their knowledge in their small beginnings in open-source software and their contributions. They get straight offers if they are well known in their communities if they switch jobs. For them, it is no contest.
For the rest of us coming from a bootcamp/university/self-taught, it is the Leetcode/Hackerrank/Codility/Data Structures and Algorithms route since they assume everyone else is an unknown dev.
Sorry to break it to you, but as far as my friends at those companies keep telling me, it is completely rigged in favor towards famous programmers.*
* Unless you have serious open-source projects used by large companies in production and you present them in a conference/meetup/etc, which is the EASIEST way to get a referral/offer via an engineer from a FAANG company IMHO.