Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?
I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.
Me and 3 other Principal/Staff levels have now worked at 3 companies in a row together over the last 12-15 years. One of us will move elsewhere and slowly bring on the rest of us as we leave if we hear great things about the place. If not we go elsewhere. We actually have a group chat of about 8 people we've all worked at various places together and love to bring others on board because we know their style and that we can work well with them.
They are amazing engineers and we've all grown together over the last decade and we know what each of us is great and at where they'd be fantastic in a company. They're SWEs and I'm an SRE so we actually aren't on the same team or anything but they know they can bring me on as a Staff/Princ SRE and we'll get things done well cross-team far beyond what most companies of disparate eng/teams gets done.
These are people super passionate about the technology. We give presentations/talks on various projects, etc. I know their skills are up to date and growing constantly. Finding someone passionate is difficult. Maybe not at google but in normal-not-faang world it is.
Bizarrely, harder at FAANG: so many people just graduated from a T30 uni or master's program in STEM and are kinda see it as "caring too much"/ it looks like you're obsessing about work
Maybe? What if the pool is being influenced with whatever is trendy at the time?
I would take my bias of working with a former colleague for years over what the current societal pressures are enforcing. Some may call it nepotism, I'd call it risk management.