31–40 of 62 posts
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.
Doctors
After my last bunch of medical issues, I lost confidence in this field almost entirely. Doctors (or at least most of them) are not critical thinkers. They simply repeat the knowledge they have seen in textbooks or in other patients. As soon as what you have is out of the common path, you are on your own. I had to do my own research to figure out the cause of my symptoms and bring those to my doctors that agreed with…
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…
By pure IQ: The smartest people I know very likely work in pure maths at universities.
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?
it is at least true in sweden that the highest earners are not necessarily the smartest: https://fortune.com/2023/02/17/smartest-not-paid-most-wages-...
(i think this was on the front page recently)
The ones I know are now either at quant firms, doing PhDs in stuff like ML, or working but in some other niche area of software (for example graphics or robotics)
I've worked at a FAANG and there are pockets of interesting stuff (mainly the research orgs) but IMO the average SDE job is pretty boring/unsatisfying, its mostly just wiring services/libraries together, shuffling data around, and fiddling with infra/deployments.
Also depends on how you define smart. M-W dictionary says intelligent, which itself has many definitions. I'm currently biased towards considering healthspan, environmental health, and (related) health of society over the next millennia; what behaviors will help us humans know the story of life on earth more deeply and continuously? It's smart to consider the long-range narrative). For background, I only dabble in software development as a hobby and sometimes to make something for work (currently at a government entity for public infrastructure).