And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.

Also, those types of stories tend to pop up with any engineer who’s only worked at a single place.

My point isn’t that there’s not bad engineers at Facebook it’s that there’s bad engineers everywhere and filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

The sad truth of hiring is that you can't afford to interview everyone, and have to keep in mind that prospective employees are showing you a different version of themselves than they'll actually bring to work.

Especially in a small company where your hiring manager may also be busy with development and sales, and not have an HR department to run the process for them, you're much better off interviewing candidates you are 50% sure of being a good fit vs 5%. Personally I prefer interviewing candidates coming from FAANG-ish companies and often make exceptions for candidates that demonstrate exceptional skill/interest, but when you can only interview 1-10% of your applicants you have to prioritize those who are likely to succeed at your company (keeping in mind implicit bias and such).

> filtering based on random signals like this is not useful.

In aggregate it most likely is useful for those companies.

> And I’ve heard just as many horror stories about companies hiring from small companies that the engineers haven’t kept up with engineering, culture and practices and are coding like it’s 2004.

Big cos can afford to onboard their engineers for months, sometimes years. Startups usually can not