I would describe FAANG (in my and many friends' experiences) as "adult daycare." Not in a bad way, mind you, but very much "get your homework done and go have your free time after." (This excludes higher management and architects, etc., of course. I mean this as a middle-of-the-road SWE on a decent team.)

I'm not quite sure where the GP got stressful, but it is soul-sucking if you expect your work to be interesting, impactful, and creative, which doesn't really happen apart from a few core or research teams. There is a ton of piping and rewriting of frameworks going on all the time, even when it need not be extremely useful. This is the main reason I found it thoroughly drab—even though it is likely that the lines of code I wrote there are likely to touch many orders of magnitude more people than anything else I ever work on for the rest of my life.

I guess that's just how it goes, though.

I fully agree. It is soul-sucking at times, but nowhere near as soul-sucking as the life I came from and I will never stop being grateful for that. If I want more excitement from working, I can always pick up the exact work of my personal interest on the side (but I don't, because there are so many other interesting things to do outside of software). I'd rather have great security and quality of life from the work that puts a roof over my head.

Absolutely! There's a kind of beautiful freedom about it, too.

A number of people (myself included) seek to align work and passion all in one, which is fine, except it's certainly not the only (or, indeed, even close to "best") way to live and work. I've been lucky because my passion is in a field that now actually has applications in both theory and practice, after 50-or-so years of lying in relative academic obscurity.

The point is: if you care primarily about things that aren't your work (and this is true for literally 99.9% of people in the world, and is probably much healthier than the alternative) then FAANG is phenomenal in every possible way. The perks, compensation, and freedom to do pretty much anything are incredible. Quant (which nets around the same, if not slightly more profit) certainly does not fall in this category, due to its insane hours, and most other jobs with sane hours and good work-life balance don't pay nearly (read: really even close to) as much, or aren't as secure, or have anywhere close to the perks. It really is about the best gig you can get, if you can swing it.

On the other hand, for the weird, obsessive .1% of people (e.g., me) who would be happy to work all day in their mother's basement so long as it's interesting work, then FAANG (or, at least, many teams within it) can feel almost beside the point. Which is also fine!

I guess the point is that it all depends on what you want out of work and out of, well, not-work!

This comment chain is well said. There are more likely to be various random events that screw you over or suddenly put extra pressure on you at smaller companies, not to mention the lack of perks and compensation. Recently an analogy that I've come up with is index fund investing: Sure one can attempt all sorts of creative investment combinations/maneuvers, and sometimes they do make it big, but in the end, the most reliable and care-free way to grow your wealth is simply to follow the mainstream advice and go for the index funds, even though they "sound" boring af. They are recommended by the mainstream for a reason just like how people flock to big tech companies for a reason (at least this still applies in our current day and age). I've had some alternative ideas about my career with various excuses (e.g. I'd only work with a functional language), but increasingly I realize that I should probably just quit all the tossing around and go for such a path instead. It's similar with my investments: Had I not performed various stupid active trades here and there and just put my money into the index funds, or even just parked my money in cryptocurrency and held on to them, I would have got amazing, carefree returns.