i'm not convinced they're smarter than anyone else. i'd rather invest in renaissance or citadel...
my coworkers at morgan were all physics or cs phds. and a consulting expert got a nobel prize while i was there. amusingly, i interviewed at google around the same time, and some of the engineers were condescending about the quality and education of my coworkers.
The smartest people I have personally worked with work for companies like Siemens, GE, etc. on very technical things that require an understanding of a broad range of tech combined with a lot of domain expertise, usually gained from at least some stint in academia. Usually money not so motivating as an interesting problem domain.
Its not so much about smartness, its about knowing what is the right move to make. That some one who isnt familiar with the product internals or the market knows better than the founders/engineers because of some innate ability is a bit far fetched
I'm not sure why anyone would think the people running these companies are any more intelligent than anyone else. In some intellect measures like emotional intelligence they are even often quite weak.
Used to know a guy: brilliant young man, excelling in the fields of physics and mathematics, and not a slouch in many others – at an amateur level driven by curiousity, but with an intelligence base nevertheless.
He had an older brother, who was, by the younger brother's own admission, a notch above himself in the intelligence department. The older brother was said to have been bored working at Google.
My suspicion is: someone in dire need of intellectual engagement might want to work at Tesla simply because of the opportunity to exercise one's mental capacity in a challenge of equivalent magnitude. (Not Tesla specifically: I suspect any company with similarly-driven heavily-pushed technical production would suffice, for a person with the knowledge of that sphere.)
Imagine Einstein or Hawking sorting paper in an office. How do you think their minds would feel in such an uncreative, unproductive environment? I'd wager they'd suffocate soon without an opportunity to express their intellect in a meaningful way. Same story, I suspect, happens with the brilliant engineers and designers at Tesla.
(Which isn't to say that the nightmare-ish conditions they're being put through are necessarily worth it, or that they can't find an outlet for their capacities elsewhere. Working for a company is simpler, in that one doesn't need to make as many choices as an independent entrepreneur would have to. It's also prestigious – since the company has a big name – which may or may not play its role.)
I would much rather work with a team of people of average intelligence, with humility, work ethic, honest enthusiasm, empathy, etc., than with a team of brilliant people with none of those things. That goes double for technical jobs where you're building a complicated product over the long term. We're not here to solve the Putnam and go home. We're delivering value, and that involves solving a hard problem simply because there is no easier way, not because hard problems are inherently worth working on.
From my experience it won't get you the smartest people on the planet, but it will get you people who _think_ they are the smartest people on the planet.
At Google I've worked with some very humble but also super intelligent awesome engineers, people much smarter than I. Definitely the majority of my interactions. But I've also worked with people who clearly took the "Google hires the smartest people" company line, and their own success at it, a little too personally.
I don't think it's a good message to send. Although to be fair I haven't heard internally in a while.
Also I don't know if it's really a gold sticker anymmore. Nor do I think it's true that the smart people leave. Some do, but honestly, there are some damn brilliant people at Google who have found their brilliant corner and produce brilliance there.
Or some people here who are just brilliant at playing Big Company. Unfortunately there's more of that all the time.
> There's probably less than 50 such places, total, on Earth, where every single engineering position is occupied by a bonafide, legitimate, super-genius.
What are these places?
Outside of a research lab, even if you had infinite money and hiring power, would you even want to staff a company where "where every single engineering position is occupied by a bonafide, legitimate, super-genius"?
If you're doing engineering (as opposed to pure research) the reality is that there's always a lot of unexciting work. Your super-geniuses don't care to do that, what you need is people who are smart enough, but more importantly reliable and willing to keep showing up and doing the work even when there's zero chance it puts them on track for a Nobel price (or field equivalent).
I'd rather have smart, passionate people with deep technical interests judge whether to fund my company than a dumb, lazy person who doesn't know math or science :)
It saddens me that so many smart people work for IT companies like Google and Facebook, while they could make a real difference doing medical or fundamental physics research.
I wouldn’t call most of those Amazon, FB, YouTube etc, people the actual smart people either. They’re mostly just lucky. What made Facebook or YouTube successful over any other competitor? Just luck that their design turned out to be the one people like more?
They mistakenly think their success is due to how skilled or smart they are they think they’re hot shit and their thoughts are gold. But most of them are just like Elon Musk: average intelligence people who got lucky enough to climb to the top of the pile.
The same is true for most software people. We think we’re super smart because we have logical thinking and understand a complicated thing that most people don’t, but then you can always get a good laugh reading the HN crowd try to talk smart on other subjects like physics / quantum mechanics.
That's possibly false: the best minds are likely working at places like Genentech (no relation to my world) and other places where truly useful things requiring deep knowledge of multiple technical domains is a prerequisite.
my coworkers at morgan were all physics or cs phds. and a consulting expert got a nobel prize while i was there. amusingly, i interviewed at google around the same time, and some of the engineers were condescending about the quality and education of my coworkers.
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