Thoughts on DS I worked with inside vs outside FAANG

I get ask the question online and in person: what it takes to get into a good FAANG company?

I spent the last year working at a Google as DS and spent the previous 3 working at random industries (pharma, supply chain, large buy-side banks, etc.)

I genuinely think that the quality of DS I worked at in FAANG were higher caliber for the following reasons:

All my teammates weren't necessarily experts at a lot of things, but they had a very good grasp of the fundamentals. If you take the DS skill tree divided up into categories (ML/coding, communication, business/product sense, etc), my teammates were at least a 7-8/10 on all of these while being expert level at some things the team was responsible for. While doing mock interviews, what stood out the most is how badly some people commuinicate . I understand that a lot of people working in STEM have English as a second language, but that's not taken into considerationg when evaluating if they want to work with you. Also, I worked with a lot of DS that score very low in some aspect of what I would consider 'fundamentals'. Some knew how to code and develop, but never took a probability class. Others had heavy math background and had no idea what to do outside a notebook. Others had a good industry experience but weren't sure how to quantify their ideas and turn it into a stats problem. At Google everyone could reliably do everything to an acceptable level, and learn how to do it better if they needed to and everyone had a good 'vibe' that made them fun to talk to and work with. Honestly, the best part of the job were the coworkers while the work itself was pretty boring.

I think I was picked for the role since it was a communication heavy role and I had a lot of experience coaching people and public speaking

To land a job at these companies I don't think you need to be an expert specialist for the large majority of the positions. I think what you get evaluated on is if a DS problem is thrown at you, or you are in a discussion about a problem, you know what is being discussed, how the problem is solved generally, or know what to look up to solve it. If you have the extensive knowledge and experience + the things listed above you'll likely get promoted to Staff level pretty quickly or hired there.

So, my final thoughts is if you are studying for these positions, don't spend your time deep diving into niche topics or doing quant style problmes. Instead, have a very good baseline understanding of the fundamentals of what DS does and be able to communicate well and demonstrate that you can contribute.

For companies that can be highly picky (FAANG, MBB, etc) you also need to pass the airport test: How would I feel if I was stuck at an airport with you waiting for my next flight?