Major reason why senior engineers/architects go for whatever technology is the hottest in the market (ie used at FAANG) is because it's the safe choice. For every new project, or for a fresh rewrite, one can either go for the incremental improvement over whatever was in use, or for the revolutionary ones that worked for FAANG and open sourced by them. If one were to go with the former, their solution will always be compared against the hypothetical much better one using the latest shiny framework/componenets used by FAANG. It doesn't matter if you made the right choice, because for you to prove you did, you have to again rebuild the application using the FAANG framework and compare the profiling/scalability numbers. Much easier to just go with kubernets microservice service mesh on nosql.
I can't help but wonder if one of the big differences between real engineers and silicon valley software "engineers" is that real engineers don't make decisions this way.
- Real engineering interviews test skills that are pertinent to the day to day work of the engineers; FAANG (and copycat) interviews tend not to
- Real engineering isn't plagued by fad-following or driven by personalities: it's backed by research and established empirical practice
That said, the profession of "real engineering" has its share of problems: advancement is as political as it is in any other industry and it's got relatively low pay compared to the true value of the output are two of the biggest.
