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.
it is at least true in sweden that the highest earners are not necessarily the smartest: https://fortune.com/2023/02/17/smartest-not-paid-most-wages-...
(i think this was on the front page recently)
Gotta find a good balance
My previous housemate worked in the tech recruitment industry, and he told me that the top end of the semiconductor industry tended to always pay better than the software industry, provided you excluded finance from the mix (where hardware engineers don't generally get a foot in outside of designing chips for HFT). Equally, though, the bottom of the scale was lower.
My personal experience supports that conclusion. As a graduate, my starting salary was dramatically lower than my university friends who went into software, but the jump in pay between grades proved to be much more dramatic.
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.
But they certainly don't have a monopoly on finding brilliant people either, while they have plenty, so do startups and bigcos and everything in between.
I just mean, I've worked at startups where people could say, write a for loop, but didn't understand how threads or concurrency worked at all, or why you'd want to use a set vs a list etc.
At least FAANG is pretty good at filtering the latter type of folks.
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.
Inquiring minds want to know.
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%....
If you look at some of the greatest figures of the 20th century, many of them pulled themselves from complete squalor and destitution on their talent/brains alone. So even back then there were means via which disadvantaged smart people could assert agency over their circumstances.
The poorest person with an internet access nowadays is far more empowered to take advantage of their prodigious intellect than anyone 30+ years ago.
Life is diverse...
People who have the will to "pull themselves from complete squalor" do not necessarily need to be high IQ individuals. They need to be fighters. Though they will fail if they have an IQ bellow 85 (that what US Army already established).
There is a correlation between IQ and income, but there is no correlation between wealth and income′.
It may be an anecdotal oversimplification, but there are people with interests completely different from what you might find interesting in life, and there are recorded cases of individuals with high IQs working as bartenders. Some high-IQ individuals become criminals due to life circumstances. Some of them don't want to stand out and pursue whatever interests they have, while not caring about the things that most people find interesting. I personally know very intelligent person who are absolutely happy with stable and average jobs, which they consider routine and to which they devote little thought (and apparently time), while they dedicate their thoughts to the themes that interest them. They do this not for money or fame but simply because they find these themes peculiar.
At the same time, you should not forget that IQ is a number that indicates only your ability to find and solve patterns and potentially be more successful the higher your IQ. However, this potential may not necessarily be realized.
Moreover, this ability to solve patterns can be a trap; without discipline, you may tend to jump to conclusions based on very little evidence.
My point is, there is a potential genius you can meet every day if you count 100 people walking past you.
However, if you consider that "genius" level starts from an IQ of 140, then only 0.48% of the human population has this potential. So, you would need to count a little more than twice as many people walking past you.
[1] https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...
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.
> a thin line separates genius from madness.
I suspect that genius is actually a form of insanity, personally. A functional form, but still...
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.
Is it your thought that the post and “I know” part translates to all smart people? Perhaps the original post was edited?
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.
Some crabs find their way out of the pot, some don’t.
Someone else touched it on it briefly, the smartest people in tech are usually in OpenSource. DEFCON comes to mind when I'm asked "whos the smartest people I know"
A lot of smart people I know work at FAANG/MAMAA, but many of the smartest people I know founded startups.
Doctors (or at least most of them) are not critical thinkers. They simply repeat the knowledge they have seen in textbooks or in other patients. As soon as what you have is out of the common path, you are on your own. I had to do my own research to figure out the cause of my symptoms and bring those to my doctors that agreed with my research.
In my case, had I not do that my doctors (saw multiple) would never have diagnosed it. This was for a rare syndrome.