[SeyelentEco]

Same I was 32 self-taught with 14 years of experience. After a few failures at these types of interviews I just studied and spent some time learning how to solve the problems companies were asking. I did better and got offers at 2 of the FAANGs and I've been at one for almost 8 years. So it's possible to be a self taught or have spent your entire life at small companies before that but studying is required for the coding part. I think behavioral and architecture are easier for those that have built a lot of things before, but they won't make up for a couple bad coding interviews.

[serial_dev]

And how do you like FAANG? I'm in a similar situation, I'm 30, worked for different kinds of companies and now I'm thinking I'd like to try applying to FAANG companies (mainly because I hope it would be more interesting, challenging for at least a couple of years, and maybe even get to know some people that operate at a different level).

[sanderjd]

From my experience, lots of great things: stability, great compensation, a never ending supply of technical challenges, products to work on that huge numbers of people use ("oh you work on that? I use that every day!"), a well defined technical career progression path, plenty of personnel depth and financial cushion to do things slowly (so you aren't ever up all night live coding against prod to keep the systems up and the business from going under), a strong engineering culture with more focus on code quality / maintainability (related to the financial cushion and also the default assumption that code will live for a long time), easy to hire good engineers so you aren't constantly strapped for talent, ... probably some more things that I'm missing.

And lots of bad stuff: the communication burden of wrangling huge numbers of people, bad decisions by leadership that you're helpless to impact, just the general difficulty of having one's values align perfectly with those of a big shareholder controlled faceless blob, figuring out what to work on that will be both satisfying and aligned with the right peoples' goals (that is, fun coding projects are often not impactful while thankless slogs are, at least for more senior folks), etc.; essentially, the politics are harder to navigate and feel satisfied with.

To highlight my first two positive points: the stability and compensation has allowed me to pay down all our debt, buy a house (recently refinanced to a 15 year mortgage), save up a year of expenses, allow my wife to go back to school, and pay for a couple kids to be in a lovely daycare. Most of that would have been much more difficult in my previous life in the startup world.

I'm very happy I got the job (when I was about your age), but I also think often about leaving it.

Hope that helps!

[SeyelentEco]

Similar to sanderj reply. It's the longest I've been anywhere. I got to work on a team that traveled the world, got to work on features used by billions of people, work on advanced hardware products, on advanced software products that use ML for Speech and Natural Language. It's not possible to work on some of these problems at other companies. So you deal with the operational overhead, sometimes long hours, the uncomfortableness when a mistake from your company causes real harm, etc.

The compensation is also something that is not as clear to someone who had a career arc like me. I've always been able to make money to take care of myself and immediate family, but making consistent FAANG money changes the way you plan and help people. I've been able to help one family member go to school, another go to med school, multiple members to move closer, allowed my parents to retire early so they didn't have to work customer facing jobs during the pandemic, donated tens of thousands of dollars to local organizations, etc

If I was single I might've left and worked at startups or smaller companies, but I wouldn't now that I see how much impact I can have on those around me by just going to work and working hard.