u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
I'm very familiar with this topic and have seen the full spectrum as well as seen most of the data round this. I time box my answers and might edit this later with more details:
1. Short answer yes some people do,
2. Codesmith judges level based on both titles and salaries when they say "senior" so it's not a canonical "top tier level" senior bar. By Codesmith's bar it's about 15%
3. The people who get these jobs fall into three buckets
1. Non-SWE roles, but adjacent, e.g. "senior solutions engineer"
2. People who have experience already as SWE's or adjacent roles
3. People who fake it and lie about their experience to squeeze through at smaller companies, startups, and non-tech companies
4. The average ENTRY LEVEL FAANG engineer has a $150K base salary, so even though the outcomes are high at a median of $127K, these are clearly not top tier senior roles. Codesmith grads that get entry level FAANG roles get bucketed into "senior".
5. I interviewed 400+ people at Facebook and was on hiring panels. People with 5 years at Microsoft were often not even leveled as Senior if they haven't worked on systems and products with MILLIONS OF USERS and been exposed to extremely complex user problems and system problems that you cannot be exposed to outside of top tier companies.
6. It's not all rosy after the job starts, people get fired, leave their companies pretty quickly, fail to get even mid level jobs at FAANG afterwards, or work 24/7 and hide their hours to get by through shear will.
7. **It is not possible to go from zero experience to senior level top-tier company engineer no matter how good anything is, you need real experience working on products with extremely complex system problems and extremely complex product problems.**