FAANG is 70% retirees, 30% dipole candle burners. And the 30% provide the value, while the 70% are along for the ride.
See in 2005 when Google was gaining traction and notoriety, it was because they had the reputation of not suffering driftwood.
I was working for a giant transnational (full-on archaic org like that in "Office Space") at the time and found it really hard to fathom a company without apathy and drifters. I (foolishly) thought it ironic and dangerous that a company so determined not to suffers fools had free food, coffee, video games, table tennis, etc in the office. My office had an old crappy second-hand foosball table that was removed because it was "too much of a distraction" despite most people not using it from fear of a reprimand.
Fast foward nearly 20 years and I guess "corporate entropy" gets everyone, eventually.
I'm sure it depends on the company/team, but 70% of retirees, I think it's a myth.
So all the hard workers describe the place as hard working. All the slackers describe it as relaxing.
Among the ex-FAANG, the hard workers describe their team as slacking. I don’t have any ex-FAANG slacker friends. They just stayed.
I’ve got 10 years of friends here and I’m fairly social so I think I’ve gotten a somewhat large sample, at least (if not unbiased).
IMO initially it's possible that folks will not be deterred but that is truly a matter of time and space for the knowledge to be available, make its way through and then impact people's behavior.
Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.