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I used to think that people at FAANGs are some of the smartest. That's the usual narrative anyways. After working with a lot of them, I realize that they have
by goalonetwo 3y ago
I used to think that people at FAANGs are some of the smartest. That's the usual narrative anyways.
After working with a lot of them, I realize that they have a long tail of brilliant people (it's a good place to rest/vest and retire) but most of them are average cogs that are only good at grinding leetcode and average on everything else.
I have seen way smarter people in startups that will never accept to work at places like FAANGs.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoFAANG has a high floor that many startups I've worked at don't have. Much less morons at FAANG than other places I've worked. But they certainly don't have a monopoly on finding brilliant people either, while they have plenty, so do startups and bigcos and everything in between.
- goalonetwo 3y agoI guess it depends how we define "smart". To me, smart means getting things done and being able to see trade-offs and the bigger picture. Something that I have seen lacking in a lot of FAANGs employee that I worked with through open-source.
- VirusNewbie 3y agoThe open source communities I've been involved in had a really high density of smart and motivated people that saw trade offs, maybe higher than FAANG, so it's likely your bar is quite high. I just mean, I've worked at startups where people could say, write a for loop, but didn't understand how threads or concurrency worked at all, or why you'd want to use a set vs a list etc. At least FAANG is pretty good at filtering the latter type of folks.