Ok sure I’ll give you an honest and candid answer. It’s basically analogous to top schools. Yes the average engineer at Google is going to be better than the av

Ok sure I’ll give you an honest and candid answer. It’s basically analogous to top schools. Yes the average engineer at Google is going to be better than the average engineer at some random company because google generally has a higher hiring bar. Similarly your average student at Harvard is going to be a better student than your average student at Random State University. As a result you will on average learn more than at most other companies. Of course there are trading firms, quant hedge funds, and a few other big tech companies with even higher hiring bars where you will learn more. And some of the things you learn, anywhere, while very useful to getting stuff done at where you work, will not be readily transferable elsewhere. But large companies as I’ve said before are basically all the same. The people you interact with are a vanishingly small subset of the entire company so it doesn’t even really make sense to speak in terms of what it’s like at the entire company. The interviewing filter mostly does one thing which is that it biases the engineers at google to be generally good at solving data structures and algorithms. This, by the way, is a skill that can be taught — and even though it might roughly approximate engineering ability it doesn’t map directly.