That's not the case at all. Unless you are one of the first few engineers of what will become an Amazon, Google, Uber, etc... coming from a small company gives very little leverage on negotiations with recruiters, visbility, etc... , the scale of problems you deal with at FAANG is 100x bigger and more impacting than at a random placeholder.io company. I'm not saying there are not many engineers working at small companies better than some of the devs at FAANG, that's a fact. Also a company success very often, have very little to do with their engineers. If you want real pedigree, start your own software company, and make it a success. Working for another person doesn't give you any pedigree. Is just a job, you work, they pay you, and that's pretty much it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking

Facebook is one the highest paying companies, the highest among FAANG. High paying companies = high demand = selective = high prestige. I would say Google and Facebook are probably the two most in demand companies (out of all companies) to work for among software engineers.

(I frequent career fairs, blind and cscareerquestions)

Have you actually work at one of these companies or did you form these notions based on others' perceptions of legacy companies like IBM and Oracle? None of the FAANG are known for good WLB outside of Google. Actually a common criticism of Amazon and FB is PIP culture so I'm not sure where you can fall asleep at the wheel for two years just because you were sociable.

I thought FAANG criteria is more a measure of how much these places pay, otherwise Microsoft would be on the list (with a market cap 2.3tn).

The original acronym was for stock performance.

lets be real, recruiters will take notice no matter what

I think your average "asleep at the wheel" Facebook employee could easily do the work of 10 or 20 ethical guys from your average Midwestern consulting firm.

(Unless the work involves having some sort of strong moral compass anyway)