> I'm a senior dev at one of the FAANGs with more than 15 years of experience, but the rest of my team consists of devs with an average of 2 years of experience.
I'm going to guess that it varies widely. I managed a team of 13 at a FAANG, with 1 new grad, 3 in the 1-5 YOE range, and the rest in the 5-10 YOE range. I was the only one with > 10 (over 20 range, actually).
Of that group, that company was the only company they've worked at. Success in getting stuff done was mostly about personality than background or experience. Those who had a need to push on things to get them done succeeded, and those that didn't had a harder time.
The main differentiator, IMHO, was that the FAANG-only folks had little to no concept of System Design or operational elements (i.e. what happens after software has been shipped). There was essentially no opportunity for the former, and no reason to dig into the latter. All the systems they needed to do work were in place, including high level architectures, data pipelines, metric capture, etc.
I'm going to guess that it varies widely. I managed a team of 13 at a FAANG, with 1 new grad, 3 in the 1-5 YOE range, and the rest in the 5-10 YOE range. I was the only one with > 10 (over 20 range, actually).
Of that group, that company was the only company they've worked at. Success in getting stuff done was mostly about personality than background or experience. Those who had a need to push on things to get them done succeeded, and those that didn't had a harder time.
The main differentiator, IMHO, was that the FAANG-only folks had little to no concept of System Design or operational elements (i.e. what happens after software has been shipped). There was essentially no opportunity for the former, and no reason to dig into the latter. All the systems they needed to do work were in place, including high level architectures, data pipelines, metric capture, etc.