That's hiring 101. You offer benefits to make up for lack of high pay. Remote work, "unlimited" PTO, generous maternity/paternity leave. Really whatever you have to offer. Not knowing that strongly suggests a lack of experience in corporate hiring and business processes, raising questions about how you came to your hypothesis in the first place. Is this maybe more of a shower thought than a genuine expectation of data?

I've been remote since 2011. It's always been the case that non-SV/Big tech companies offer generous benefits to tempt people away from the more competitive, higher stress, higher demand jobs.

It's not so much about whether or not they do much work. It's about the breadth of that work. FAANG devs tend to be relatively focused in their skillsets, if they need to cover a different skill set those companies just hire someone full time for that role (or many someone's, creating a whole department).

In mid-level and especially in small enterprise companies there's a lot more of breadth than depth. You don't need someone who can squeeze milliseconds out of a particular framework or compiler, but you might need someone who normally writes code to set up a config for nginx or help data put together a report for the next board meeting.

The complexity of the tasks isn't necessarily as high in smaller companies as in FAANG, but the variety can be much higher. In some jobs I've done SSRS, Nginx, Excel, and worked in C++ in a single day. and that was as a Ruby/Rails developer.

Context switching and more general technology skills are things we've tested for/asked about when interviewing ex-FAANG employees, where someone coming to us from a nearby competitor or similar industry might get a more general set of questions about their experience with ancillary technologies, rather than being tested against it directly.

To a degree this applies to a lot of FAANG (Exceptions Apple and, if you count them, Microsoft).

I've done a lot of hiring at mid-sized companies, and while I wouldn't necessarily call it a black mark, but it does create this sense of a candidate that's both very expensive, and possibly very coddled. The hiring teams at mid-sized companies definitely tend to assume that someone who's worked at FAANG may be missing what's considered fundamental skills at lower levels, where they assume other mid-sized company developers probably have those skills.

It leads to some more basic questions coming up in interviews for ex-FAANG candidates that might not be asked in the normal interview process. At some companies, with some interview groups. I want to be as clear as I can, this is something I've seen at some midsized companies. It's by no means an absolute truth or even a majority of companies.

At others it might be a full on black mark, at others it's probably a leg-up over the competition. There's really no accounting for personal biases, and it's not really worth worrying about building your career around them.

None of these things represent a threat to a reasonable person, and strange questions are what we're good at as a species. We invented god and the devil, we invented lizard people disguising themselves as human and running for political office.

We're not confused or terrified of these things as a species. Some members of our species are incredibly anxious and terrified of everything, you seem to be on the anxious side, but that just isn't most people.

Most people won't even think about these things beyond the conveniences they provide, like the way they treat facebook's data sharing today. Convenience trumps existential questions like privacy, humanity, and the nature of the human soul.

Some people will be excited for the potential changes and nerd out about it, much like the people who closely watch the space industry and dream of mars colonies.

A tiny, tiny percentage of people will stand on street corners and scream that the end is nigh. They'll be driven crazy by the changes to what they see as the natural course of human evolution.

But they won't impact how humanity moves forward with these advances. Because humanity will just keep moving forward until and unless something wipes us out. It would take a near-extinction level event for the average person to start having daily anxiety about advances in biogenetic and computer sciences. Most people just aren't that fussed with it.

And absolutely nothing coming in the next 20-30 years is going to change that barring a nuclear war or asteroid hitting the earth. Societies change quickly, but not that quickly.

I think you might have already started losing it.

Nothing you described is even mildly reality breaking. In fact, I'd argue that nothing is reality breaking beyond the very short-term reaction for humans.

We're extremely adaptable. Things that seem unthinkable quickly become "Oh, another infinite source of information that I carry with me at all times? Boring."

Even if the truly unthinkable happened, say we were visited by a race of aliens that revealed the secrets of God the universe and everything to us, the chaos would be temporary. A matter of decades at most, more likely just a couple of years.

Not because we're sane, rational beings capable of absorbing and understanding it, but because we're upjumped monkeys with short attention spans. In a very short period anything will go from "terrible truth" to "Not my problem" as we move on to other concerns, search for new stimuli to amuse us, or just give up trying to figure out what it means and focus on our own lives again.

Very few people care, or would spend any time on, what it all means. Religions adapt to keep their tithes flowing in, but the average person just nods, smiles, and goes back to their Real housewives marathon.