So that is well known. What's not well known is this: there are pockets of brilliant people elsewhere, including Bentonville, Arkansas.
Especially in the years running up to 2000, I had the pleasure and honor of working with some of the most talented people in the world, even though we were all looked down on by many people on the coasts.
It's funny, because for the first 2/3 of my tenure there, WalMart Information Systems Division did move extremely fast....and yet almost never broke anything.
It was an amazing thing to see.
(You're almost certainly already aware of http://old.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport - but just in case. And hint hint.)
I would argue the caliber of people I worked with there, from no name universities, or known names, but not equivalent to many people (Georgia Tech vs Berkeley, say), was generally better there. It of course varied person to person, but the teams were generally stronger, senior devs were more senior, juniors tended to be hungrier to learn, etc. Maybe it was just the lack of the FAANGs sucking up the best people.
I was like "WTF? They've probably never heard of Waterloo either!"
(For anyone unfamiliar, these may not be household names, but they are definitely top tier CS schools.)
Edit: we also hired a few idiots out of MIT. Remember one instance when an intern from MIT sent an email to a wide audience something to the effect "your API is breaking my code, fix your API". This was in C++. They were asking for something that didnt exist and then blindly dereferenced the nonexistent first element causing a segfault. My response was to the effect of "youre dereferncing an empty vector. API is fine. Fix your fucking code."
The interns original email was sent to just my team, but CC'd nearly all of front office. In my reply I added all of backoffice so they were aware of the idiot. Never heard from them again...
The coasts tend to have clusters of many top caliber technical colleges.
At that scale, everything had to be almost perfectly automated.
And, to be clear, this was not a static, boring network. Stores, home offices, distribution centers, you name it, were being added, moved, expanded, deallocated 24 hours a day, all over the world.
And the device configs were far from cookie cutter. An eye-wateringly complex heuristic was required to dynamically create router, switch and access point config that would allow a given store to function.
And, one quarter in the early 2000s, we (Network Engineering) achieved six sigma (99.9999%) global uptime.
Things did start going downhill around 2004 or so, a few years after Kevin Turner became CIO.
May I ask which one? Just idle curiosity.
What a lot of Silicon Valley people don't get is that there are people just as smart as them everywhere.
Walmart has had a pretty savvy tech presence in SV for decades...
