1) companies usually hire ex-Googlers up-level because they're perceived as being more valuable (Google titles tend to under-represent engineer capabilities; an L4 Googler is an SSE elsewhere).
2) Google was one of the FAANGs that fixed wages via unofficial non-competes. Their compensation ladders still reflect that.
I know at my last job I closed any resumes that had Google on them. They generally didn’t do well at startups in my opinion, the scope and responsibilities are too broad and there is no where to hide. And the ones I did hire tended to want to make everything look the way it did at Google.
That seems a little much; Google has had such a huge number of software employees, that it seems unwise to draw assumptions about everyone based on what I imagine has been a much smaller sample size than the total that you've personally worked with.
exactly this. Working with a couple ex-google and ex-facebook. Without failing every meeting we hear at least once "At Google/Facebook we used to ..." for something that is completely not applicable here.
I work at one of the big companies and some people do that even here. People just talk about their experience or other systems that they know. It always feels conservative to me, as often it's said to suggest emulating what some other group or company did to solve an often superficially similar problem, but with entirely different constraints. I think some people with certain kinds of thought patterns just pattern match and try to apply past experience a bit too broadly.
Smaller companies need to outbid Google for talent, especially if they carry less stability. I imagine there are quite many who went like: leaves Google for great cash package at smaller company/start up -> smaller company goes belly up -> go back to FAANG
