Why are there so many University of Washington grads at FAANG companies?

You're asking why a Seattle located university has a high degree of placement into a suite of companies with a high presence in Seattle?

Sure. San Jose is not Seattle. Nor S.F. but, Seattle has massive presence in FAANG doesn't it?

I'd be interested if the % varies for Microsoft and Boeing: that might show if the effect is out of scale.

There's also a long tail effect of hiring staff from x who gain seniority and then hire staff from x because it's a known quantity.

And with a massive ICT sector people from UW can cut their teeth in junior roles close to home after graduation, get their chops and then swing into FAANG with good credentials and experience behind them.

MIT and Boston might be similar.

Guess which university close to the seat of government (cough George Washington uni) has an amazing track record of placement of graduates into think tanks and lobby groups...

Another part of the answer is that UW sits at #10 in the USNews list of top undergraduate CS programs in the United States: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/computer-scien... and even higher in their postgraduate CS program ranking. While such rankings can be gamed to some extent, there is little doubt that UW has a very highly regarded CS department.

White collar jobs tend to really be about the connections between people. It sounds like UW has a placement program with all the connections on rails and ready to run students through.

I don't know how accurate this spreadsheet is but UW stands out.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16dDaOHI5KJb_tO_iHXBP...

Make sure they're not confusing this with Washington University in St. Louis. This (wustl.edu) is a long-time big-name school in computer science, home of code repositories from ancient times.