I worked at Google for 7 years, admittedly a decade ago. We didn't grind leetcode, We didn't jump through mindless hoops, and we had almost 0 bureaucracy. So for at least that letter in the acronym it was nothing like you describe.

> admittedly a decade ago

In 2011 Google had 32,467 employees.

In 2021 Google had 156,500 employees.

It is simply not the same organization as it was when you worked there. The 2011 employees account for at most 10% of the workforce today once attrition is taken into account.

I feel like employed by google means being unemployed if they are going to be laid off whenever the managers want. So I don't want to work in Google

Wait, how is that different from any other s Corp in a country without layoff protections?

So maybe their h-1b has just expired

It doesn't expire for 60 days because they're not "really" unemployed till then. Which is still extremely bad government policy; you don't want your best taxpayers to leave.

So maybe they avoid tax declaration and government no longer wants them in the country?

Who's declaring what now? Paying taxes as an employee isn't opt-in.

Paying tax as an employee isn't opt-in. Paying tax as an employer isn't opt-in.

Why both of them? This has never made any sense to me.

I don't know how it works in United States. In Europe, Companies declaring the money deducted from the salary they have paid to the tax office, the employee is correcting if it is right or wrong. If they need to pay, they pay more, if not, they receive more.

Anyway my feeling is still the same, being employed by google means you're unemployed. This is a feeling. Being employed by apfel would make me feel different.

Most of US has at-will employment, so how is it different from everybody else?

I too go to dinner and expect to pay with the pearl I find in my oyster. FAANG are relatively merit based jobs that pays exceptionally above band and a lot of people try to get into them. The jobs are scarce, sure there is more talent, but you basically are getting insurance on candidate quality.. Saying I'd rather hire someone who comes from something much more statistically unlikely and even harder to do due diligence.

My experience is opposite to what you described. I got into faang with minimal leetcode grind and didn't have to jump many hoops. The career move not only removed the unnecessary bureaucracy from my daily activities and tools, but also finally gave me actually challenging problems to work on. I suppose it's always a matter of perspective, but I'd wager 90% of work at 90% of startups doesn't equate rocket science. When looking for a startup to work for, you have to filter out a lot of bad ones and the balance between difficult and impossible can be hard to strike. If you have a good idea and a decent skillset founding can be impressive, but generally I've found faang engineers to seem more apt than most people I've met at/seen in startups, with the exception of 1-2 superstars per startup.

Don’t forget choosing projects purely for the promotion folder and ignoring existing work if at all possible.