I mean, you can say the SAME thing about getting into an Ivy League school. Your application and skillset is likely similar to THOUSANDs and yet still, you have to prepare like it is the Olympics AND have luck. No one lucks their way into FAANG, you still have to answer the questions well and contrary to much of the HN crowd, these are not easy questions for most folks EVEN after studying...
You can't get in without both luck and preparation. That part I won't deny, but most exclusive things in life involve that bit of luck since everyone starts to hit the "threshold" of qualifications pretty fast
>I mean, you can say the SAME thing about getting into an Ivy League school.
No, you cannot say the same thing about Ivy League admissions, at least not at the current point in time. Ivy League has a massive supply of qualified candidates to fill the demand (aka the fixed number of seats they have) many many times over. Tech companies don't have that luxury. They have a lot of candidate supply, but the "qualified" candidate supply is much more difficult to come by.
Ivy League admission officers admitted multiple times in public interviews and public statements that there are a lot of people that would qualify and succeed at those schools just fine, but the schools have very limited numbers of seats, so they have to have the bar be set higher and higher in order to accommodate truly the "best" (based on whatever metrics they use to determine the best).
With FAANG? They are desperate to hire good engineers. As someone who interviewed candidates at one of them, for every single interview I went with the mindset that I want to hire that person, as long as they demonstrate they are competent enough to do the job. There is no such thing as "limited" number of spots (as it is with Ivy League admissions). If every single candidate we interview is qualified, we will hire every single one of them, we won't be artificially raising the bar just to accommodate a specific X number of people because we cannot fit more. We can. Of course, my specific team cannot hire 50 people, but if all 50 candidates are competent, we will try to set them up with one of our sister teams or any other team in the company that desperately needs engineers, and there are tons of those teams.
The real problem is that a lot of those people we interview tend to not even be able to do fizzbuzz, and I am not exaggerating. I used to think that people said that statement as a joke back then, but after interviewing enough candidates, I realized that they weren't kidding.
TL;DR: they aren't similar, because Ivy League has a fixed number of seats available, and even if every candidate is qualified, they can only accommodate a predetermined number of them, so they have to artificially raise the cutoff metrics. For every candidate my team interviews, we can easily hire every single one of them if they are competent, without artificially raising the bar just to have a fixed number of hires.
You can't get in without both luck and preparation. That part I won't deny, but most exclusive things in life involve that bit of luck since everyone starts to hit the "threshold" of qualifications pretty fast