100,000 of the best out of a pool of approximately 10 million professional software engineers worldwide is a sizeable portion. Additionally, not all 10 million are even close to being up to BigCorps peculiar standards (perhaps the standard is "someone competent enough that they could potentially build a competing product line").
Goog, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Oracle.. all have huge rosters and it adds up to a significant portion of the market. There is also a huge amount of medium sized whales such as SAP and PayPal who in total end up also consuming a lot of the talent.
I don't think grinding leetcode for an interview is the best indicator of a good engineer, and graduating from a prestigious university is not always an indicator either. imho it seems like the best engineers now are the ones doing their own thing outside of the large companies, or are at smaller startups.
Having said that, the national labs do seem like good places to go geek out in your own advanced intellectual cul-de-sac.
Maybe there are some super great private projects but I expect those amazing capabilities would still be evident in the stuff that is put out.
Note, there’s some good stuff out of NIST and NASA (check out open.nasa.gov) but I don’t see things being handed off to Apache and stuff.
I bet NASA and NIST have a great bunch of quality all-round engineers, but I'd be surprised if they were better at leetcode than the average FAANG dev. After all, FAANG devs have literally been filtered through an "are they good at leetcode" process. FAANG may be full of money chasers, but if the way to get more money there is by "being a good engineer" that does not mean much.
Not firing folks, low pay, focus on the best work life balance in history, heavy affirmative action, politics, and having to work hard to carry the coasters isn’t an environment that naturally attracts skill and competence. Work 500% harder than the next guy and get the same promotion. No thanks.
The gov and contractors, like it or not, are jobs programs first and foremost. A remarkably effective jobs program if you just measure folks employed and not output.
Their employees are also the subset of those who can get to a location where they have offices and have the relevant work permits. Those who do not object to and specifically want to work at those companies. Those who find their technical challenges of interest. Those who do not already have a satisfactory job elsewhere and are actually in the market for a job.
The recruiting reach is high because every single sub-group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same time is completely immaterial, just like if they were recruiters from other companies.
And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft.
Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked at (or got offers from) some of them.
That said, the interactions I've had with the people working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy to work with and obviously very skilled engineers.
Most of those companies have less than 30k SWEs, not 100k - https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1527004655540133888?... (feel free to google the others)
So for each company they represent at most around (edit: 0.3%) of all professional devs, and presumably the "overhired for anti-competitive reasons" portion is a small fraction of that.
Just because someone "uses JavaScript" doesn't mean they are a full-time professional. In fact, most are dabblers. The number depends entirely on the definition - are all IT professionals considered software engineers? If so, that's about 24 million.
I am talking about full-time SWEs.
In any case Drew, it sounds like we're mostly in agreement. What a relief! :D
We can't really know what is in the minds of Zuckerfk and Pikaichu, in the end it's all speculation.
It turns out that being able to solve cute little puzzles while interviewing doesn't really help with systems level thinking.
I think he might have backed himself into a corner by coming in as an 'advisor'. How can I be an advisor if I look like i don't even understand what is going. That must have been his mindset. So the only escape is being arrogant and belligerent.
I'm glad you put it that way. It's not necessarily smarts or talent, but it does take a particular willingness for the institutional peculiarities to integrate with a big organization. I'm not one of those people, I tried it, and I will never do it again. I did note, you either had people who had just joined, or people who had been there for nearly a decade or more. I think of the word "institutionalized", as in, they had bought into the institution lifestyle, and were so full of it's arbitrary knowledge that moving on would be like starting over.
