Which put a thought into my head: A lot of smart people I know work at startups, but all of the smartest people I know work at FAANG/MAMAA. In fact, none of the smartest people I know, to my knowledge, have ever pursued a startup.
Does this ring true for you as well?
In terms of developers, it's typically been the opposite. That the best developers I know had previously worked at larger firms, but don't anymore.
I suspect part of being smart in general comes with the realization that there's more to life than a job's status and salary, and prioritizing those other things is a wise thing to do. So having picked up competency at large companies when younger but moving away from them later on trends to correlate with the smarter people I know.
There's no real divide between startups and corporations in terms of talents from what I perceived. The industry was in general seething with talent.
After working with a lot of them, I realize that they have a long tail of brilliant people (it's a good place to rest/vest and retire) but most of them are average cogs that are only good at grinding leetcode and average on everything else.
I have seen way smarter people in startups that will never accept to work at places like FAANGs.
They tend to work for companies that are on the forefront of whatever flavor of tech they are interested in, so they work for a variety of different kinds of companies.
The smartest PEOPLE I know aren't software engineers at all.
Of the two, though, obviously larger companies are more likely to even be able to fund truly novel research compared to a startup. There's only so much you can do under the constraint that anything you build has to be a component of a usable product you can plausibly sell to a defined market in the next six months.
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#:~:text=8.1%....
Smartest one I known so far works at a corp and is often moved between teams for new projects. Second smartest person I know works at a tiny startup and enjoys life and as chill as Buddha. The third smartest person I know doesn’t do tech anymore, was promoted to higher level management and left tech because he made immense f*ku money and is mostly travelling these days.
I read a thin line separates genius from madness.
His entire life has exemplified this.
It's profoundly sad to see him - his genius is a curse.
Also depends on how you define smart. M-W dictionary says intelligent, which itself has many definitions. I'm currently biased towards considering healthspan, environmental health, and (related) health of society over the next millennia; what behaviors will help us humans know the story of life on earth more deeply and continuously? It's smart to consider the long-range narrative). For background, I only dabble in software development as a hobby and sometimes to make something for work (currently at a government entity for public infrastructure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnogenesis
People critique him on non important parts of theory, but the main idea is excellent.
Idea is, few percents of people have from nature wish to change world, Gumilev named them passionaries.
And unfortunately, ONLY these people have ambitions, want to make money and searching some endeavor.
Passion is not totally unconnected to smartness, but if some person is smart, but without passion, he will not use his brain to grow. I seen huge number of smart people, who spent their talent to just avoid work.
So, what I want to say, if you see some person looking dude, this is not evidence, he could just imitate this, to more easy get joyful life.
And the second important thing - sometimes career of person powered by some his relative, or friend, or just some manipulating person, who constantly pushed him, and even more, this pushing person could be smarter than his object(S). (Yes, many pushing persons push on several persons, not on one person).
Sure, sometimes, people sacrifice their life, to help their relatives or loved, for example to got out from poverty, but I think, in Western countries you don't need to do such sacrifice, their social system and economy are good enough, so who don't want to be in poverty, will not be.
So short answer - now you would find smart person literally everywhere, you just need to figure out, he is smart.
So to be fair, I'll check the 5 people who I don't know what they're up to.
1. Petroleum engineer at a petroleum company.
2. Well engineer at a petroleum company.
3. Manager at a petroleum company.
4. Doctor in a well paid city.
5. Manager at the Ministry of Finance.
There's still a bias - all are from the same (expensive) university, so there's a bias towards scholarships or rich kids. All are mid 30s, Malaysian nationals who have lived for years outside their home country. I'm sure the results would be very different plus/minus a decade.
Seems like many in their 30s took a job, hated the job, did freelancing etc, ended up in the highest paying job they could find. One was a doctor who became a manager in a petroleum company.
The smartest person I know left the industry after doing a few years of freelance work¹ earning heaps of money and bought a property for their family to settle somewhere remote.
¹ ABAP
The ones I know are now either at quant firms, doing PhDs in stuff like ML, or working but in some other niche area of software (for example graphics or robotics)
I've worked at a FAANG and there are pockets of interesting stuff (mainly the research orgs) but IMO the average SDE job is pretty boring/unsatisfying, its mostly just wiring services/libraries together, shuffling data around, and fiddling with infra/deployments.
No, this isn't sarcasm or a joke. I do wonder if there's some sort of inverse correlation between intelligence and ability to thrive under corporate bureaucracy.
A lot of smart people I know work at FAANG/MAMAA, but many of the smartest people I know founded startups.