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!
Winning at ACM & TopCoder doesn't necessarily translate into being a good exhaustive software developer.
True that! Then again, only those with genuine interest and motivation will pursue such endeavors so more likely they are genuinely good at it.
Any new grads who got offer from Google or Facebook will ditch Amazon.
They are better companies to work at as they don't use stack ranking. Also they are not stingy like Amazon
new grads maybe, but I was in a clear mind when I've chosen Amazon (while had Google offer) because Amazon offered more ambitious project to work. However now I'm not sure anymore that it was right decision.
Just in general, based on what I have seen over the last many years, folks in the Bay Area, especially coming from the top universities, are more likely to be enterprising and innovative. This doesn't mean others are not, it's just less likely and fewer in terms of percentage. Since more Bay Area educated folks tend to stick around in the Bay Area, it isn't surprising that google/Facebook has a higher percentage of such folks. Also, a lot of these folks are genuinely into coding, computer science, data, AI as opposed to pursuing those areas because they are trending topics today. That shows.
I worked at Microsoft. Same deal -- there is a distribution with only a few exceptional people. I suspect it's the same everywhere. Besides, I'd rather work with well adjusted engineers that can get stuff done than with idiot savants that can only blast through competition problems
Well said... I agree
Some really really smart people at Microsoft and some head scratching "how did you get hired?" types. I'd imagine it's the same at all the companies.
A lot of this is team dependent. My team (it is an ML team, so a mix of SDEs and scientists) has rockstar engineers, a chess grandmaster, successful startup founders, AI PhDs, top tier MBAs, and hobbyist quants trading currencies. However, those of us over 32-35 years in age also have family obligations and thus no longer spend all our free time working on Open Source projects and other personal coding adventures. I think if you look at the highly desireable and selective teams at Google and Amazon you will see similar things. If you find yourself surrounded by unimpressive people at Amazon, look at other teams in areas where there is a lot of innovation going on (robotics, ML, drones, NLP, computer vision, and many more). Hit up jobfinder, demonstrate that you have the initiative to learn a real research area, and there will be tons of opportunity.
I agree it is team dependent. As I've got older I started downplaying the intellectual parts of my resume and personal hobbies. I continue to publish research and contribute to literature but sharing that with coworkers seems pompous. It has no bearing on the work we do together. It also comes off as autistic and hurts socializing. I want to drink beer and make jokes with my coworkers, not discuss unrelated math.
Interviews are a crapshoot. I know a guy who failed Amazon, Google but got into msft and FB. So it's across the board. Don't let your company define who you are. Focus on skills instead and learning/growth
Don't worry, later on in your career you will find out some of the following: 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.
Very few people at Google, or elsewhere I'd imagine, and groundbreakingly intelligent. Most are just average. Quite a few are below average
have you worked at another big 5 company?
I'm extremely certain you don't actually understand what average is.