In a word, it's subjective.
As we move through life we humans enjoy extracting pithy and broad nuggets of wisdom from our experience as we introspect. Occasionally they are even generally true! But as I've grown a little less naive I've come to appreciate that most broad observations, as convincing as they may appear, are usually incredibly subjective - to the originator (among which I include myself) they make 100% sense, but devoid of the context from which they derived (as they are often presented) they are usually little more than noise.
It's the horrible gnarly truth of the world that we must become comfortable with to stop making these oversimplifications. </ armchair philosopher>
Getting a job at RenTech is easier than winning the Nobel or Turing, but harder than getting a job anywhere else.
Getting a job at hardass backend FAANG is easier than getting a job at RenTech, maybe about as hard as getting into an Ivy with undistinguished parents.
Hitting that top 1-3% performer at FAANG is harder than completing a PhD at Stanford or Cal, but easier than selling a YC startup for 500MM+.
People want it to be subjective so that 0,0 can be in sight of wherever they are, but I know damned well that I’d flunk a RenTech interview, and even more so that I’ll never win the Turing.
There’s a lot of structural nuance and important details but it was an absurdly elite group of people who hadn’t been disillusioned yet and we forced Google’s jaws open wide enough that there are now 2 panopticon ads businesses instead of 1.
Antonio García Martínez wrote a great book about it called “Chaos Monkeys” if you’re a long-form reader.
The thing with these fluffy observational posts is that it’s rarely if ever concrete: here’s the Goliath to our David, here’s the advantages we leveraged to get the drop on the better-resourced, ostensibly smarter competitor, here’s how we opened the door with the slender bit of the wedge, and this is how we maintained cohesion and momentum to ram it right up Goliath’s ass.
Anything short of that is fucking whiffle-ball and is a waste of pixels on HN’s front page.
Let’s hear the actual story about how your scrappy and creative and cohesive group left the big enemy with a broken jaw. Otherwise, yawn.