In my experience, FAANG are no more skilled than anyone else. The main thing is that they seem to do a better job of not hiring complete duds, so their average cleverness may be higher, but I’ve worked with brilliant people at every regular shop.

I agree but complete duds can really drag your team down as you end up spending a ton of time trying to fix their shortcomings and amount of code written on the Ops side to prevent them from completely screwing everything up is mind boggling.