I want to work with smart people. My coworkers at Microsoft don't seem to want to learn. Some of them have been around for 10+ years and from what I can tell (which could be wrong) they know the c++ standard fairly well and they know politics (how to make the boss and coworkers think you're smart and hardworking). C++ is cool, but I don't want to be in a position where the key to success is memorizing it. It would be nice to use math and algorithms knowledge while on the job. I feel like I was so desperate for a job out of school that I took the first one that hired me. Moreover, I've stayed here for two years. Does Google still have smart people? What other companies should I look at? I'd like a team that's actually solving problems and not solving "problems". A team that actually engineers and that isn't just creating "features".
From what I read, you want people who grow, more than just "smart" people.
Can you elaborate? Coworkers who both grow and are smart would be nice. Why do you say that growth might be important in this case?
You said your current colleagues aren't pushing themselves to learn. That seemed to be the main issue for you, rather than them not being smart. Just trying to help you refine what you're looking for.
Tl;dr In your case I think the team matters more than the company. I recently saw a reddit AMA where the google engineering manager literally says “we are prioritizing engineering craftsmanship before start working on new features”. So there’s that. Also sounds like the problems that you would like to work on would fall more into the infra domain. Unfortunately I feel like most companies are product-driven so unless you’re a badass in the infra domain, you might find your career trajectory slower than someone in product team. Take this with a grain of salt though
You're in the retirement company. Go work at Fb and you'll see lots of smart young people who are eager to learn everything very fast.
Software Engineering Career
Yesterday
2881
28 terrorist worshipping idiots just got themselves fired and I've never been prouder to work at Google.
Tech Industry
Yesterday
334
Amazon Internship or TikTok Fulltime?
Tech Industry
Yesterday
1895
What is the appeal to NVIDIA?
Layoffs
Yesterday
11398
Google CFO confirms "large-scale" layoffs today (Apr 17)
Tech Industry
Yesterday
12685
Goog Employees Arrested
Change teams, look around. Microsoft is fairly big and there must be teams doing better work. Though largely interesting projects are a question of luck in my experience for the simple reason that new/from scratch development projects are way lesser than mature existing projects that people build on/support. Your other way out is to think of something in your team itself and drive it yourself.
Personal experience, driving something yourself will be hard as you need to convince others to onboard with your initiative. Else you will be the sole contributor which can significantly reduce the impact of the work you’re doing when politics comes into play.
Yeah depends on the risk appetite, least risk is within team, then changing teams, then changing companies(some would say teams vs companies is similar level of risk, with company change potentially paying higher but it's offset by interviewing effort, new env, newer set of people, different culture and so on). So really depends if project has some pain points to address and if the time taken is less to invest than other team or company, this is a good option plus gives op skills to convince people etc, makes a good resume item even if it doesn't make a lot of impact eventually