It’s always odd to me people ask this, because you see it all the time if you work on big infra. It just goes to show my experience at mostly infrastructure at

It’s always odd to me people ask this, because you see it all the time if you work on big infra. It just goes to show my experience at mostly infrastructure at big tech is just not normal. Anywhere there are extremely large or technical company will have stellar ICs. All the FAANG have them (not everyone working there is one, but they are around and you find a lot of them on e.g massive distributed data systems). Not only do you run into stellar staff engineers at these places, but if you work on critical infra at say Google, you run into a couple 50x engineers that defy classification. Any company that produces a world-class database, distributed system, etc. will have very good, very expensive staff engineers, who really are ICs and not managers.