> It is certainly not impossible. Every "high-end" engineer started out as a junior at some point in their career/life. And I don't think it requires working at a FAANG either.

There's a significant group of people who follow a path like: "get an internship at a company with a known brand, then get more and better-known full time interviews as a result, then get one of those well-known jobs and as a result get EVEN MORE interest from recruiters" which must be nice.

If you aren't at one of the schools those companies hire interns from, it's definitely a lot harder, but still far from impossible.

For sure, it's a lot easier for people who did undergrad at Standord/MIT/CM to get the internship (and the FTE role). But we shouldn't confuse "Stanford CS grads are overrepresented in high-end engineering roles" with "most high-end engineering roles are done by Stanford CS grads". Most people doing this kind of work went to a college you never heard of and maybe didn't even study CS.

Oh, I think the pool is a lot larger than that. I've seen pretty good industry hiring representation at a bunch of first-and-second-tier non-Ivies, includes UCSD, Washington, Waterloo, Purdue, Chicago, UTexas, UCLA, and a lot of others. (And similarly, the company base is a lot broader than just FAANG.)

I bet there's a set of 20 or so schools, though, that make up a disproportionate amount of those high-paying jobs, though certainly the long tail is very long.

> a bunch of first-and-second-tier non-Ivies, includes UCSD, Washington, Waterloo, Purdue, Chicago, UTexas, UCLA, and a lot of others.

You are putting schools of vastly different calibers in the same bucket there.