its funny how all of the best programmers i know have quite a lot of disdain for the idea that Google or Facebook are good at engineering... their public facing

its funny how all of the best programmers i know have quite a lot of disdain for the idea that Google or Facebook are good at engineering... their public facing code is good evidence of it too. HHVM is full of rank amatuer crappiness, as well as some fairly cool stuff... but mostly crappiness and WebRTC is an absolute nightmare to use in practice compared to most rookie efforts in the same area (and its not because of what it does, its because Google have lots of internal stuff to work around the shittiness that isn't public afaik). i've met plenty of very shitty googlers and facebookers, as well as some truly excellent ones. but i suspect you will find much better guys in games, vfx, military and finance (which at least backs up some of your point). in my experience there is a much lower tolerance for crappiness in those fields by necessity. the performance and quality bar they have to meet is orders of magnitude higher in a lot of cases...