[jakub_g]

My answer above is not very complete so I'll add what some siblings wrote:

IMO people are not that desperate to work at FAANG in EU as in US (from what you can feel reading HN, blogs etc. "FAANG or die", "leetcode for life").

Reasons are: 1) FAANG have limited presence in EU. Often you'd have to move countries or at least cities. In many smaller cities you can also make good money in IT with lower cost of living outside of FAANG; 2) they pay better, but nowhere near the US market craze; you can get,say, 20k better but not 200k better; 3) FAANG in EU tend to hire rather senior engineers; 4) there's this feeling that it's hard to get there and you get whiteboarded with irrelevant process, so many people don't even bother trying; 5) many people are perhaps not very up to date with US companies' salaries possibilities (open salary sharing in EU is not very common, and glassdoor often has few / outdated data points; outsiders don't know about Blind, levels.fyi etc).

Having said that I'm in my 30s so I don't know what current students think.

[detaro]

Re 3), at least in my circles (finished uni past few years) plenty folks got junior positions at Google, Amazon, and MS (a good chunk through internships, but not only)