My first real software job was at a 10 person firmware consulting shop. Some guy from Microsoft got burned out and joined us, and it was mind-blowing. The dud

My first real software job was at a 10 person firmware consulting shop. Some guy from Microsoft got burned out and joined us, and it was mind-blowing. The dude barely came into the office. Even when he was there, he was half-aslseep at his desk 75% of the time, and he still singlehandedly got more done in a week than everyone else in the company combined. Some of us had been theoretically doing the same work for 5-10 years, and our company was well-respected in its niche as an expert on what we did, and we still just couldn't compare at all. 10 years later, I was burned out from working at my crappy FAANG job building platforms to spy on people, so I went into consulting on my own. Sure enough, it was a really similar situation.. I don't want to break any NDAs or sound like a jerk, but I was rolling in and doing things in hours that teams of my clients' best engineers had been failing at for months at a time. You could grab just about any mediocre nobody from a FAANG company and drop them into any tech company somewhere else that normally pays sub-six figures, and they'd be the top performer there. I think it's something that can be taught, and maybe we'll have a tech renaissance now where everyone goes back to their comfortable hometowns, but there's a very real skill differential between the big tech hub cities and the rest of the planet. (And yes, I'm including other countries where even super hard-working geniuses make $35k a year or less.. because a lot of those geniuses eventually tend to either make their way to the USA, or start their own successful companies. If I found out I could eventually make $3.5 million/year by learning Chinese and working my way over there, you'd better believe I'd get it done)