> I will say that my experience at FAANG companies is the engineers there do to get dream big and come up with ingenious engineering solutions that make engineering work at non-FAANG look like college senior undergrad projects
My own experience at FAANG and non-FAANG is that __some engineers__ at FAANG get to dream big and demonstrate ingenuity, whereas at non-FAANG (especially startups I've been at) everyone can do this, though not all take the opportunity.
At my last FAANG where I was a manager, my opinion is that performance management and the focus on bullet points, metrics, and peer feedback for review time is a huge limiter for everyone else. I spent a lot of time creating cover for people on my team to actually try something new and innovative. More senior management constantly wanted to know why person X on my team was working on a new thing instead of trying to move some incremental metric somewhere else. Based on my experience during performance reviews for senior ICs, risk taking wasn't particularly encouraged at L6 (or even L7) and below as the cost of failure was substantial.
My own experience at FAANG and non-FAANG is that __some engineers__ at FAANG get to dream big and demonstrate ingenuity, whereas at non-FAANG (especially startups I've been at) everyone can do this, though not all take the opportunity.
At my last FAANG where I was a manager, my opinion is that performance management and the focus on bullet points, metrics, and peer feedback for review time is a huge limiter for everyone else. I spent a lot of time creating cover for people on my team to actually try something new and innovative. More senior management constantly wanted to know why person X on my team was working on a new thing instead of trying to move some incremental metric somewhere else. Based on my experience during performance reviews for senior ICs, risk taking wasn't particularly encouraged at L6 (or even L7) and below as the cost of failure was substantial.