How smart are Amazonians in comparison to engineers from Fb, Google, Microsoft and Apple?
I had internships in Google and Facebook and now I work for Amazon a second year. While I'm proud that the company had achieved as a whole I feel that our top SDE2/3 across the company are on the level with an average Google / Facebook engineer at the best. It was a normal that the person who works near you is winner of ACM/TopCoder/etc, that ML guy is on the top of Kaggle, that unsocial wierdo in the corner is Chess grandmaster and the girl from IT desk can assemble Rubik's cube under 15 seconds. In Amazon almost all people I communicate with - the ordinary Joe. I'm not trying to offend my colleagues or myself by any means - we're all working very hard, learning, building products for millions of people. I often feel myself like a minion from Despicable me. But I clearly can see that amazians don't program after the work, not that curious, not obsessed with anything, and generally regular people (IQ) unlike majority of Facebookers and Googlers I worked with.
I would like hear from other people who worked in 2+ companies from big 5 - how do you compare engineers from that companies. Thanks!
comments
bail now
1) Not all smart people want to work hard.
2) Smart people who want to work hard can see more work to do than their manager. They're too busy to talk to someone they haven't already heard of.
3) People who work hard consistently will outperform the #1 group but not be able to quote white papers or other trivia back at you.
4) Some people will do crap work to be around their role models or gain experience
5) Some people lead a less privileged life and didn't get to finish college
6) Some people haven't had a good nights sleep in years, for good and bad reasons.
7) Currently, almost every American has to work to eat.
People who have been at 2+ big 5 companies are unlikely to have been on a good team AND part of the Blind userbase.