There’s no honest answer to your question because it relies on a generalization and a vague metric. Clearly not all Google and Meta engineers lack competence. A

There’s no honest answer to your question because it relies on a generalization and a vague metric. Clearly not all Google and Meta engineers lack competence. And competence depends on circumstances — the team, the project, the organization. I think all organizations experience a Pareto distribution, where a relatively small number of people contribute the most to productivity. That doesn’t mean the majority lack competence, though it might. It could also mean the organization prevents people doing their best work. John Carmack said as much on his way out of Meta. Some projects fail even though the engineers did good work. I think it’s going too far to suggest “engineers working for Google/Facebook are only good at memorizing Leetcode questions.” On the other hand a shocking number of working programmers can’t effectively produce code. Jeff Atwood described this almost two decades ago. https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/