Where are the best and brightest software engineers working?

"best and brightest" is subjective. You can point to the peak of academics and say it is them. Or the ones making the most money. Or the ones making the best-known brands. Or the ones quietly keeping systems up and running. Or even the ones who gave up the game and are peacefully pursuing their own hobbies outside of the industry.

So you can probably answer your own question by defining what those terms mean to you, and following where that leads.

At some point in time, you could probably point to anyone of these places to answer your question and been correct:

- Moore Hall at Harvard

- Los Alamos

- Bell Labs

- Apple/Microsoft/Google/IBM/etc…

These days, the answer isn’t so cut and dry, and that’s definitely a good thing. More of us can benefit by having access to the “best and brightest“, and not having them be sequestered away where none of us can learn from them.

That said, some characteristics I look for in a bright engineer to look up to:

- endless enthusiasm over their subject matter expertise

- a broad understanding of how their expertise fits into the broader field

- a humble attitude - the more you “know”, the less you realize you actually know

- constant learning attitude, always reading some new book or improving their education

- a willingness to teach others

Best and brightest at what? Software engineering has a lot of subspecialties, like distributed systems, operating systems, graphics, AI, and so forth, and those are the places where the best and brightest go because their talents are valued there.

Right now, not in Google, Meta, Amazon

They went to OpenAI, claude and others

but I would say the brightest are working by themselves, making millions with low effort and enjoying life

At home.