because the bug tech companies are more likely to pay big $$. There's a huge gap in salary potential between FAANG and the rest. There's always outliers among the rest, but that's generally the case. So if you're optimizing for $$ and prestige, you optimize for getting into FAANG.

I've worked at two of "FAANG" and know enough people at two of the others (all but Netflix). The vast majority of Americans at all those companies went to mediocre public universities. (I don't know enough about foreign educational credentials to judge whether that's true of non-Americans).

The notion that FB/Amazon hire primarily from the top 5 universities is so totally unrelated to reality that I feel like I'm watching people discuss the consequences of the fact that the earth is flat.

Sure if money is what you want to optimize for, that's the route to take. For me it was always more about the passion in building things, money is nice but IMHO other things are more important.

I'm pretty confident that most of the young people optimizing to get into the very top schools, are optimizing for $$.

Perhaps to some extent some are optimizing for social class (staying in the one they grew up in).

> "There is plenty of work, why focus so much about the big tech companies?"

Big tech companies tend to have interesting work. Why would anybody jump through the hoops to go to a top university to get an ordinary coding job?