>There's prestige, salary, and quality of life that just can't be matched by any other tech companies.
To asses the quality of life you have to take into account : payment, time spent on the job and for the job, the amount of work, the prices in the area you live and work, the stress level, the interactions in the company and probably more.
I've done these calculations and for myself, job hunting for FAANG isn't worth. I would however not refuse to work for FAANG if that would match my personal goals, however working for FAANG would not be a goal in itself.
At 45, I’m still an active developer and these days just your regular old “Enterprise Architect”. Married, dual income living in the too big house in the burbs of a major metropolitan city. We make “enough” that making more wouldn’t change our lifestyle.
Grinding algorithms to work for a FAANG doesn’t interest me. I’m actively disinterested.
Even though I started as a hobby developer in the 80s doing assembly and spent the first decade of my career writing assembly, now I’m much more interested in solving business and process problems than I am in the computer science side of software development.
So, next move will probably be more in the Solutions Architect/Professional Services/Enterprise Architect/Consulting route for a few years. I’ll have to do a little “grinding architecture”, and I may end up at one of the major cloud providers but that isn’t a goal in and of itself.
To asses the quality of life you have to take into account : payment, time spent on the job and for the job, the amount of work, the prices in the area you live and work, the stress level, the interactions in the company and probably more.
I've done these calculations and for myself, job hunting for FAANG isn't worth. I would however not refuse to work for FAANG if that would match my personal goals, however working for FAANG would not be a goal in itself.