Plus FAANG is like grad school for startups. Startups love their CTOs and tech leads to be ex-FAANG. Looks great on the "who we are" pages and slides. You're way more likely to be able to land a top-level position at an early, promising startup with that in your work history. I suspect lots of them round-file any applications that don't have either FAANG or something really remarkable and relevant (say, published research in the same area the startup's working on) as their first filtering pass. They need someone with a history they can sell to investors and early clients.
Plus FAANG is like grad school for startups. Startups love their CTOs and tech leads to be ex-FAANG. Looks great on the "who we are" pages and slides. You're way more likely to be able to land a top-level position at an early, promising startup with that in your work history. I suspect lots of them round-file any applications that don't have either FAANG or something really remarkable and relevant (say, published research in the same area the startup's working on) as their first filtering pass. They need someone with a history they can sell to investors and early clients.