After more than two decades as a professional software developer, I've never set foot inside a FAANG company. When I taught at a coding bootcamp years ago, however, it seemed to be all some of my students could think about, the ultimate destination, the golden ticket that would validate their career pivot.

I've received the recruiter emails, tackled the coding challenges, and even entertained the idea on multiple occasions. Yet each time an opportunity arose, I ultimately chose to walk away. This wasn't some contrarian stance or attempt to be different, I simply took an alternative path organically and decided to stay on it.

And overall, I've found great success in doing so without having to battle it out with tens of thousands of candidates fiending for my position.

Building Experience in the Corporate Trenches

My journey led me through over a decade in traditional corporate environments, working with real teams on real products under real deadlines. I wasn't living the digital nomad lifestyle, building passion projects from exotic locations. I was in the trenches, doing the daily work of software development, just not at one of the Big Five.

The opportunities to make the leap did present themselves. Recruiters reached out regularly, interviews were scheduled, and colleagues would occasionally ask, "Have you ever thought about Google?" But nothing ever compelled me to pull the trigger.

The closest I came was an initial screening with a recruiter who outlined the gauntlet ahead: three months of interviews if I wanted to be considered for the position.

He even sent me a giant list of coding challenges and data structure questions to brush up on. At this point, I was already 6-7 years into the field and had worked on various large scale applications. I was a senior developer for all intents and purposes. And the idea of having to sit through a barrage of linked list questions was not appealing in the least.

Perhaps it was a cultural mismatch, or the prospect of becoming another cog in an enormous, hyper-efficient machine. Maybe I simply didn't want to start over in an environment where the rules were established by people I'd never meet and couldn't influence.

Whatever the underlying reason, I remained where I was and built a career that I'm genuinely proud of.

The Corporate Advantage: What You Gain Outside FAANG

Working in traditional corporate environments offers a different kind of experience. One that even the most prestigious tech companies can't always replicate, at least not easily.

End-to-end project ownership becomes the norm. Rather than building isolated microservices, you're developing complete features and sometimes entire applications.

You see projects through from conception to deployment, gaining a holistic understanding of the development lifecycle.

In most jobs where I was hired as a senior developer, I typically found myself being the only developer on that particular website.

Versatility becomes essential. One sprint you're debugging production issues, the next you're collaborating with the marketing team on feature requirements.

This constant context-switching accelerates learning and builds a broader skill set than hyper-specialization ever could.

Individual impact is amplified. You're not one developer among 200 React specialists, you're often the developer for your domain. This pressure, while sometimes intense, forces rapid professional growth and builds confidence in your abilities.

During one of my software developer jobs, I was the only C# developer in a pool of 200 developers, where most were specialized in PHP. Anytime the company acquired a new web application written in C#, I was brought in to be a part of that team temporarily to make sure that everything was up and running.

Cross-departmental collaboration is standard. Regular interaction with stakeholders outside engineering provides crucial business context.

You understand how your code translates into business value and customer outcomes.

Work-life balance remains intact. Professional growth doesn't require grinding LeetCode problems after hours or sacrificing personal time to stay competitive.

If you're currently the sole engineer on a 20 million dollar application, you're more than likely catching more attention than someone who knows how to balance red black trees.

Truth be told, at most normal software companies where I've worked, I've rarely had to solve any cryptic riddles or niche algorithm challenges that never appear in real life.

At most jobs, my experience was the forefront. What I've built, how I built it and how I manage and maintain those applications.

Rapid iteration and feedback loops characterize the development process. Your work goes live quickly, you see immediate results, and you learn faster through this shortened cycle.

You also tend to break more things on production, because of the lack of this formal scaffolding that big tech teams spend years optimizing.

While some FAANG teams certainly offer similar experiences, they typically come with significant caveats and constraints.

The Trade-offs of Scale

In organizations with tens of thousands of employees, the fundamental nature of software development shifts. Everything becomes more segmented, more process-heavy, and more diluted.

Scope becomes artificially narrow. You're hired to work on one specific slice of a larger system, and that's precisely where you stay. The breadth of experience that comes from working across multiple domains is sacrificed for deep specialization.

Feedback loops extend dramatically. You implement a bug fix and then... wait. Layers of process, approval workflows, and rollout procedures create distance between your work and its impact.

This extended cycle can be frustrating for developers who thrive on seeing immediate results.

Process often supersedes speed. More systems mean more approvals, which means more meetings. The infrastructure is undeniably robust and the colleagues are brilliant, but autonomy, visibility, and development velocity often become casualties.

The Interview Industrial Complex

Then there's the hiring process itself, a multi-stage marathon that has evolved into its own specialized discipline. Algorithmic whiteboarding sessions, system design panels, behavioral interviews, and culture-fit assessments all stand between candidates and positions that might involve maintaining internal tooling or fixing CSS bugs.

Contrast this with the straightforward hiring processes common in traditional corporate environments. My first development role? A single thirty-minute conversation with the IT director, a handshake, and a start date the following week.

Despite this streamlined entry point, I still became a capable engineer. I shipped products, resolved production outages, architected scalable systems, and mentored junior developers. No binary tree inversions were harmed in the making of this career.

The FAANG interview process optimizes for test-taking ability rather than real-world engineering competence. Personally, I never had the bandwidth, or the inclination, to train for assessments so disconnected from the work I already knew how to do well.

Choosing Your Own Path

FAANG companies aren't inherently problematic. For the right person at the right moment in their career, they can provide extraordinary opportunities for growth, learning, and impact. The compensation is undeniably attractive, the technical challenges can be fascinating, and the networking opportunities are unparalleled.

For me, however, the trade-offs never aligned with my priorities. I wasn't chasing external validation or industry prestige. I was focused on building a sustainable career on my own terms, with autonomy, variety, and direct impact on the products I helped create.

And twenty years later, I remain comfortable with that choice.