FAANG is composed of large companies - not great companies. Those employers rarely make it onto genuine lists of best employers and if you want real pedigree on your resume you'll want to come out of a small but successful company. You can be asleep at the wheel for two years and leave a FAANG with neutral or positive reviews because you were sociable - if you helped grow a tiny company into a small company recruiters will take immediate notice.
That's not the case at all.
Unless you are one of the first few engineers of what will become an Amazon, Google, Uber, etc... coming from a small company gives very little leverage on negotiations with recruiters, visbility, etc... , the scale of problems you deal with at FAANG is 100x bigger and more impacting than at a random placeholder.io company. I'm not saying there are not many engineers working at small companies better than some of the devs at FAANG, that's a fact. Also a company success very often, have very little to do with their engineers.
If you want real pedigree, start your own software company, and make it a success. Working for another person doesn't give you any pedigree. Is just a job, you work, they pay you, and that's pretty much it.
Facebook is one the highest paying companies, the highest among FAANG. High paying companies = high demand = selective = high prestige. I would say Google and Facebook are probably the two most in demand companies (out of all companies) to work for among software engineers.
(I frequent career fairs, blind and cscareerquestions)
Have you actually work at one of these companies or did you form these notions based on others' perceptions of legacy companies like IBM and Oracle? None of the FAANG are known for good WLB outside of Google. Actually a common criticism of Amazon and FB is PIP culture so I'm not sure where you can fall asleep at the wheel for two years just because you were sociable.
I think your average "asleep at the wheel" Facebook employee could easily do the work of 10 or 20 ethical guys from your average Midwestern consulting firm.
(Unless the work involves having some sort of strong moral compass anyway)
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I thought Facebook specifically was known for being the highest paying of the FAANGs because they are the least prestigious (and also people have ethical concerns re: their products).
Okay I'm not sure how HN convinced themselves of this but higher paying means more prestige, not less prestige because "no one is willing to join otherwise". It would seem pretty intuitive but apparently not on here where the mental gymnastics to discredit FANG has somehow correlated lower pay with better job these days.
And prestige among the FANGs generally goes: Google and FB in their own tier (depending on whether you value WLB or compensation and promotion rate), Apple and Netflix slightly lower, and Amazon (and Microsoft, albeit not a FANG) much lower than all of them.