What are the odds of working at a FANG etc?
So...this is a hard to enunciate and perhaps a bit of a nebulous question, but I'm going to try. Please be patient.
I would like to know what the odds are of a software developer getting a job at one of the top several firms. My reasoning is that, while I know of some people who have gotten in, it would seem there is a tipping point where the odds are so low that there really is no point in making the attempt. It's the lottery ticket problem - the payoff is large, however the odds of winning are infinitesimal.
So, is there a metric of how many developers there are currently divided by how many open positions there are at MSFT, AWS, Facebook etc somehow adjusted for the skill level of the average developer? I understand that skill level is hard if not impossible to judge in an aggregate sort of way, I just want to have an idea if I'm wasting my time even thinking about those companies in my job search.
I was on the job market in finance during the financial crisis. I don't want to go through what I went through then again. If you can treat it as a game of endurance that you are willing to participate in then you will probably succeed. A lot of people on HN claim to have had multiple interviews over a couple of years, so failing to get hired is not going to ruin any future options with the same company. A co-worker of mine recently was hired by Apple and I consider them rather unremarkable but also precocious. Other colleagues of mine that have worked at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are very capable, excellent communicators, and very interested in pushing the edge of technology, but they are not super-human by any measure. For ivy league graduates, it's doable. All others will have to work much harder to impress (entering lottery odds).