[afjeafaj848]

The smartest people I knew in school didn't seem interested in regular web dev jobs (front end/back end), like that was too easy. A lot of them interned at FAANG doing that kind of stuff but didn't return.

The ones I know are now either at quant firms, doing PhDs in stuff like ML, or working but in some other niche area of software (for example graphics or robotics)

I've worked at a FAANG and there are pockets of interesting stuff (mainly the research orgs) but IMO the average SDE job is pretty boring/unsatisfying, its mostly just wiring services/libraries together, shuffling data around, and fiddling with infra/deployments.