51–60 of 62 posts
The smartest software engineers I know work on open-source software. The smartest PEOPLE I know aren't software engineers at all.
> The smartest PEOPLE I know aren't software engineers at all. Inquiring minds want to know.
If we assume that 1% of the human population are potential geniuses, then at the moment, we have about 80 million potential geniuses on the planet. They are not always aware that they have this potential. Life and financial circumstances follow a standard distribution. Not every potential genius on Earth will receive the required education and a nurturing environment. You can assume there are more potential geniuses…
If you look at some of the greatest figures of the 20th century, many of them pulled themselves from complete squalor and destitution on their talent/brains alone. So even back then there were means via which disadvantaged smart people could assert agency over their circumstances.
The poorest person with an internet access nowadays is far more empowered to take advantage of their prodigious intellect than anyone 30+ years 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 pl…
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.
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 pl…
FAANG 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.
If we assume that 1% of the human population are potential geniuses, then at the moment, we have about 80 million potential geniuses on the planet. They are not always aware that they have this potential. Life and financial circumstances follow a standard distribution. Not every potential genius on Earth will receive the required education and a nurturing environment. You can assume there are more potential geniuses…
The higher your IQ the more likely you have the capabilities to remove yourself from bad circumstances. I'd wager it's very unlikely that if you reach adulthood and you're still working a minimum wage job, barring significant mental health issues or life circumstances, you secretly have a top 1% potential genius IQ. If you look at some of the greatest figures of the 20th century, many of them pulled themselves from c…
Life is diverse...
People who have the will to "pull themselves from complete squalor" do not necessarily need to be high IQ individuals. They need to be fighters. Though they will fail if they have an IQ bellow 85 (that what US Army already established).
There is a correlation between IQ and income, but there is no correlation between wealth and income′.
It may be an anecdotal oversimplification, but there are people with interests completely different from what you might find interesting in life, and there are recorded cases of individuals with high IQs working as bartenders. Some high-IQ individuals become criminals due to life circumstances. Some of them don't want to stand out and pursue whatever interests they have, while not caring about the things that most people find interesting. I personally know very intelligent person who are absolutely happy with stable and average jobs, which they consider routine and to which they devote little thought (and apparently time), while they dedicate their thoughts to the themes that interest them. They do this not for money or fame but simply because they find these themes peculiar.
At the same time, you should not forget that IQ is a number that indicates only your ability to find and solve patterns and potentially be more successful the higher your IQ. However, this potential may not necessarily be realized.
Moreover, this ability to solve patterns can be a trap; without discipline, you may tend to jump to conclusions based on very little evidence.
My point is, there is a potential genius you can meet every day if you count 100 people walking past you.
However, if you consider that "genius" level starts from an IQ of 140, then only 0.48% of the human population has this potential. So, you would need to count a little more than twice as many people walking past you.
[1] https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...
The smartest people I know left tech. No, this isn't sarcasm or a joke. I do wonder if there's some sort of inverse correlation between intelligence and ability to thrive under corporate bureaucracy.
It's less about intelligence I think and more about curiosity, autonomy, and mastery not being able to survive in said corporate bureaucracy. You either get wealthy or make do within your means and leave for industries, orgs, and teams that crush your soul less (or, hopefully yet rarely, bring you joy and meaningful work). Some crabs find their way out of the pot, some don’t.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The higher your IQ the more likely you have the capabilities to remove yourself from bad circumstances. I'd wager it's very unlikely that if you reach adulthood and you're still working a minimum wage job, barring significant mental health issues or life circumstances, you secretly have a top 1% potential genius IQ. If you look at some of the greatest figures of the 20th century, many of them pulled themselves from c…
There is an implicit bias in the assumption that high-IQ individuals should naturally seek high-profile or high-income jobs. Life is diverse... People who have the will to "pull themselves from complete squalor" do not necessarily need to be high IQ individuals. They need to be fighters. Though they will fail if they have an IQ bellow 85 (that what US Army already established). There is a correlation between IQ and i…
I've bounced around a few companies, and all the smartest people I know are in the semiconductor industry. Some of them - self-proclaimed hardware engineers - would write better code than what I've seen come out of lifelong software devs. They have crazy deep, specialised knowledge on so many fields it boggles the mind. There's no real divide between startups and corporations in terms of talents from what I perceived…
Isn't the pay poor in the semiconductor industry?
My previous housemate worked in the tech recruitment industry, and he told me that the top end of the semiconductor industry tended to always pay better than the software industry, provided you excluded finance from the mix (where hardware engineers don't generally get a foot in outside of designing chips for HFT). Equally, though, the bottom of the scale was lower.
My personal experience supports that conclusion. As a graduate, my starting salary was dramatically lower than my university friends who went into software, but the jump in pay between grades proved to be much more dramatic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FAANG 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.
I 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.
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.