How is Google different than others? How FANG i.e. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google are different than others. They recruit best talent, enable them to do their best, have best software engineering process, have setup best tools and frameworks and they also have carefully designed organizational setup. Google and Facebook use their own software like emails, office suits and messaging systems for day to day work.
Not only best pay, but they also offer best work environment, travel opportunities and training to nurture talent. There are lot of smart people to learn from and plenty of opportunities to grasp best technologies at these companies. You will find so called 10x engineers in your team.
However, landing a job at FANG is very tough. You need to be excellent in many aspects. Be it coding, algorithms, data structures or operating systems. Also you need to be able to apply these concepts to solve problems. Recruitment process is very thorough and optimized to eliminate any false positives. You will not find any misfits into these companies.
Day to day work involves designing, coding, reviewing etc. You will get to work on lot of challenging projects. The most important thing is that your project is having impact on millions of users or even billions in some cases. You can imagine, how many users Facebook has or how many people use Google search daily and how many web pages are indexed by Google. Due to the huge scale at which these systems operate, there is no scope for mistakes. This is what makes working at these companies different. They need to manage multiple complex aspects like huge data, speed, availability, security etc. It definitely involves lot of planning and learning as well.
To make a bright career, you need to work with best minds in the industry. If you are the smartest in the room, then there is not much to learn from your peers. You may consider this as time to leave. At these companies you can always find someone smarter than you which gives you an opportunity to learn and improve your skills.
It’s not just about the special status that you get while working at these companies. You get to work on top notch consumer facing products. You also get an opportunity to contribute to open source projects. There is huge contribution made by these companies to open source projects. There are multiple software tools developed internally by them and later released to the world. There are lot of interesting problems they need to solve and lot of interesting projects they need to deliver always. Someone may have a doubt that as the products and services offered by these companies are matured, there is less scope for doing new things. But when you have billions of users you need to keep adapting and improving. There are so many things to do that they need to prioritize and delay certain projects. There is always a never ending list of projects, features and improvements. The opportunities are never ending.