What's sad is that a lot of these dead weight engineers ruin the pool of qualified applicants just because they google, twitter, facebook etc. in their resume.

What's sad is that a lot of these dead weight engineers ruin the pool of qualified applicants just because they google, twitter, facebook etc. in their resume. I know it's preposterous to say stuff like that on HN which has a weird love for these companies, but some of the absolute worst engineers and PM's I have had the unfortunate punishment to work with went to Stanford, did some sort of management training seminars in Stanford or worked at some of these companies. It's not because they are worse than other engineers. It's that because since they went to those places, people immediately attach some sort of competency to them that may or may not exist, and more often than not, does not. Most of them are just average engineers like everyone else, but the worst of them are average bad engineers with an absolutely unwarranted confidence akin to that of snake oil salesmen, that uneducated leaders believe in simply because they don't know any better, not least because of societies unwarranted, constant advertisement of their competencies.