Where do I work if I want to be surrounded by smart people?
301k TC @ ~3 yoe (all 3 at Google) I don't feel challenged at Google, even after a team switch. I want to know where all the exceptional people work. I'm not Superb or anything, definitely not the top 1% of the company, but I've found that my work has become just moving protocol buffers- very rote. The technical standards are strong but the emphasis on excellence isn't as high as I'd want it to be. In my day-to-day, I no longer feel pushed by my coworkers. It's just about cranking out the same shit at higher volume, faster, not making better shit. So I want out. I'm not an exceptional engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't seem to find them around me. I want to know where they all went. Places I'm thinking of: - autonomous vehicle places (Waymo, Cruise, Nuro) - fintech places (Robinhood, Stripe, Brex, Square, Coinbase, Plaid) - trading firms (Jane Street, Citadel, Hudson River Trading) - early-stage startups??? Blind, any hints?
Startups, but inspect the engineering team members on linkedin
What to look for?
Kinda obvious--technical achievements in prior companies, common interests, personal technical blogs, open-source.
Find companies doing innovative work. Palantir, databricks...
What’s innovative about palantir?
New ways to find brown people to drone strike
what makes you think listed fin tech places has potential working with such ppl. I’d suggest getting out of generic swe roles and target niche highly specialized teams like apple aiml (not the org but specific team) Facebook fair etc
Mainly that's where my smarter friends are working. For highly specialized teams, there is the advantage of working with deep domain knowledge but the risk I foresee w.r.t. exceptional engineering is that when you're operating on the frontier it's even easier to abstract away/shrug off challenges of correctness and performance and reliability and focus on the happy path. Or to build a poor API or disregard some other design priority. I think those environments will help me learn something new but beyond domain knowledge I'm not convinced that going back into deep learning will really push me the way I want to be pushed unless I somehow get to do PhD level work.
So you want to work on doing things correctly vs launching or learning new stuff? Interesting indeed. Better stay away from small companies, fb, Amazon, and fast moving teams; you might end up hating your “smart friends” Always thought google and Netflix were the right place to be to build such highly scalable distributed correct systems with laughingly low usage.
Grass is always greener on the other side !
Netflix.
“I'm not an exceptional engineer by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't seem to find them around me” Maybe start by becoming an exceptional first to know how to look for exceptional people. Maybe your coworkers are thinking the same about you.
Ok but it's probably easier for me to just imposter my way into Jane Street than to actually git gud
If you want to be surrounded by exceptional people but also think that you can impostor your way into Jane Street, why would you think you'd be surrounded by exceptional people at Jane Street as opposed to be surrounded by other impostors?
Come on over to Waymo.
I’d agree with the other commenter, work on a niche field that is getting a lot of investment or you can work on pushing protos around (nothing wrong with that, but I find more sophistication in more complex topics). Some fields include VR/AR,AI/ML, Computer graphics/simulations, etc.
Facebook?
nah, smart people do not go to FB obviously, rather only the money hungry nerds.
Reviewing Carmack’s phabs would be fun