Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter

It used to mean something more than it does now. I noticed ex-Googlers were well above average in 2012, now they can be below avg. I have a colleague of mine at my current job that makes a point of being an ex-Googler but they only worked there for 6 months, so it is kind of meaningless.

It's always been a distribution. Some are amazing, some are normal, others are less than normal. They're all really good at the handful of things Google screens for, but otherwise it's just like any other distribution of developers.

As a hiring manager I view Google on someone's resume as a non-signal. If however they are the sort of person who draws attention to having worked at Google I view that as a negative signal.

Global average or people-who-work-at-FAANG average?

The frame of reference here is important, otherwise average is pretty meaningless since we have no objective list of what an average developer consists of.

Is that really true? I've interviewed ex-FAANG employees at some jobs and there was never any pressure to hire them, and I didn't feel like any one of them would be treated as a god if hired. They were pretty universally above average though.

They were also not "walking in to captain" anything. They were applying for standard engineering jobs. Think of an average individual-contributor software engineer from, say, Facebook. Is a smaller company really going to hire them as Director Of Engineering (a totally different job than software engineering), just because of the company name on the resume? That sounds absurd.

The amount of osmosis learning of how things should be that comes from working somewhere that things were that way is hard to explain. The density of good ideas you get exposed to has a huge effect, even if you aren't in leadership. It also doesn't necessarily come across in interviews, it's reflexes you might not realize you have.

I was very skeptical about this, then I worked for one. Now I get it.

I'm not in a leading role but I did "impactful" things like introduce CI to a company. I'm not sure that it matters what position you have, because if you are the first one doing something you actually get to do a lot of decision making.

This is such a glorified and Heroes statement which just tells that some faang guys has such a skewed view of the world because of faang.

All I see is that faang is a term for expert code monkey.

And really only an expert in the things that FAANG companies do. Granted for a place like Amazon that's potentially a very broad space, but it's still a small slice of skills compared to the world where software is ubiquitous. Among other things, zero preparation for safety-critical software. An attitude like "move fast and break things" would end up being "move fast and kill people", and that's kind of a drag on your career. (Insert long discussion about trolly problem and how self-driving car researchers are justifying their crappy algorithms)