[hnfong]

What are you talking about?

TBH I can't even chain together any of your reasoning here. How does teams wanting to hire seniors imply juniors who join won't be able to learn? Were you on those teams? Did you actually see "yoda class devs" refusing to spend effort to grow their junior team members?

And how is mentoring juniors an even remotely acceptable substitute for learning from the best in the industry? Having juniors question your assumptions only works for making you aware that they might be bad, but doesn't necessarily help in guiding you towards making the right ones.

The only issue I take with GP's is the assumption they make with FAANG having the "best engineers". At tens of thousands of software engineers per company, the concentration of top talent is quite dilute, and if you're unlucky you'll see a lot of mediocrity just due to the large numbers. My impression is that often smaller companies with an strong engineering culture might have "better" engineers on average.