[blaisio]

I agree with everything except the projects. It is true that Google Amazon and Facebook have projects that are exclusive. But there are lots of other interesting and widely used projects out there. Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Rust, Firefox, Python, VueJS, Linux, Apache Hive, Hadoop, etc. If you care about projects that involve the largest number of servers, you need to work for one of those companies. But if you care about your code being used by a huge number of people, there are lots of other interesting things out there.

[rak00n]

Also you may not end up in one of those "cool" projects either even if you land on a FANG job.