I have been in the same team in a FAANG ever since I graduated, things are going well tbh and I am very grateful for the position I am in. Promoted to Staff after a few years, fully remote, extremely overpaid, work 40-45 hours a week, great paternity leave benefits that I am about to take advantage of, etc. It’s a backend C++ role. I can’t help but feel my growth stagnate significantly since the company put everything except AI on KTLO mode (including the products we support). Most of the great SWEs I looked up to and saw as mentors left for OAI/Anthropic/xAI/etc.

I used to get reach outs from recruiters of those companies but didn’t take them seriously because the paper money aspect was too risky for my circumstances at the time. I can’t help but feel a lot of FOMO right now thinking back. Most of my colleagues/friends that went to these companies have been working on very interesting problems that involve building systems from ground up rather than being production engineers for legacy systems. There is no guarantee that I would have gotten the job there, I do feel bad for not even trying.