No comment on the "shafted" aspect, but the "not geniuses" thing is exactly correct, and I wish I had realized it sooner. I didn't apply for google when I left

No comment on the "shafted" aspect, but the "not geniuses" thing is exactly correct, and I wish I had realized it sooner. I didn't apply for google when I left college because I didn't feel like I would "meet the bar". ~4 years later, feeling like I was a much stronger candidate, I interviewed, hoping to barely scrape by and be the dumbest guy in the room to keep leveling up. I was dumbstruck by just how totally normal everyone was. Everyone I met at google struck me as being in the 50-75th percentile of my peers in startup land. They're not some high-powered cohort of elite intellectual supermutants. They're regular people. I was ready at graduation, and sold myself short for no good reason. Now that I work at a BigCo, I feel even more strongly that the bar is, if anything, on the low side, simply because an org that big needs a constant influx of warm bodies. We hire more people in a month than some of my past employers would hire in the lifetime of the company. It's flat out impossible to staff 5,000 people while demanding that they all be in the top 10%. There are weird and arguably arbitrary hoops to jump through, but you can do it. Interview prep was radically simpler than EG buying a house (in terms of prep, context gathering, etc.)