I'd give FAANG more credit if they had better track records of producing good products with good design and good engineering, but the track record is mostly a trail of failures in terms of bad design and bad engineering.

Facebook has largely stagnated aside from acquisitions. Most of their scaling issues were resolved a decade ago. If you consider the repeated, practically universally hated redesigns, how is their hiring process working for them exactly?

Amazon has numerous, obvious, long standing problems with their web store and cloud services. Maybe they are engineering toward higher profits instead of satisfied customers. Fire stick and amazon video UI is a trash fire. Regardless, I don't see any amazing engineering coming from amazon. Maybe its all in fulfillment? From what I can tell, Amazon just finds okay engineers that are willing to be exploited until they run away when they realize how awful it is to work there. When you consider the fulfillment employees things don't get rosier.

Apple basically forces a curated design aesthetic down their users throats. Some like it, some hate it. I use a mac and android. As a user, iOS and macOS literally sicken me; I have to go into the accessibility and turn off all the animations and transparency. Apple's software has notoriously gone down hill for many years in terms of bugs and performance. I'm sure there's a lot of great engineering work that goes into a lot of what apple does, but it's almost all throw away. They focus on trendy features that no one wants. It sells a new year of iPhone upgrades, then it's abandoned because no one used those features. I still feel bad for all the companies that have been swindled into adding touchbar support and all the users that were swindled into paying $200 for the touchbar they won't use.

Netflix hasn't changed in a decade. Maybe their backend systems have improved? I still regularly encounter buffering issues and the UI has been terrible since the first iteration. I still get DVDs in the mail and they visually downgraded the UI for that a few years ago but otherwise the feature set has never changed. The quality and selection of the petrol-disks transported using petrol is still superior to the largely-free-to-them transmission of the digital versions. I presume their hiring is largely focused on content creation at this point. Maybe their backend systems are more reliable now through engineering?

Google is so infamous for product failures theres a metaphorical graveyard. How many times have they tried on the messaging front? I think we are at iteration 6? That's 5 failures in a row. The things they've succeeded at like search, mail, and maps were all done over a decade ago. Since then it's just been repeated downgrade after downgrade. Maybe all their engineering work is going into search rankings and anti-spam which are decent but not obviously better than its been in the past. Point of diminishing returns probably.

I'm sure there are brilliant engineers working at all those companies, but it largely isn't demonstrated in overall output from the sector. Now considering the quantity multiplied by the quality of engineers, it's truly shocking I can't reliably send a text based message to an arbitrary person in the same city.

I think FAANG's success is more easily attributed to non-engineering related choices that have hurt users and the industry to a much larger degree than it has benefited them.

All things considered, the efficacy of their hiring practices can't be too far ahead of the industry average so I don't think it's fair to hold them up on a pedestal and claim 'Regardless of how bad you think they are at hiring, FAANG's hiring practices are effective'.