The running joke among the last few years of MIT grads, as far as I've heard from our hires, is that only the bottom of the class goes to work at Google.
That’s baloney. The Course 6 undergraduates I know that went to work for Google, Snap and Microsoft had perfect 5.0s. There may be jokes about those kids but being the bottom of the class makes the least sense.
Grades aren't everything. How many times have you worked with a highly-credentialed person who couldn't perform when it actually mattered?
Baloney or not, I've got grads from the last 3 class years telling me this.
Also, I'm specifically talking about Google. Not any other FAANG.
Google is seen as a place to park yourself at a high salary, not have any responsibility and not get much done. Almost all of them interned at Google at some point and that's how their internships went too.
That's most tech companies that model after Google and have their senior leadership all ex-Google. Including mine.
Hiring seniors is tough and not a lot of companies want to pay market for them when they can get fresh meat for the feature factory and see if they get good on their own in a year or not.
It's extremely unfortunate, but for me the solution is to not work at places with hundreds+ of engineers.
