[monaghanboy]

Have you found any meaningful correlation between "talent" (engineering or otherwise) and tenure at a well-known tech company?

From my experience, and based on people I know that work at Facebook, e.g., getting your foot in the door is just a matter of studying medium/hard-level problems on Leetcode (speaking verbatim here). I'm not sure you need a strong foundation in systems programming or design, or even a strong track record of building great software to get hired at these kinds of companies. The metric is mostly Leetcode; it's for efficiency I guess, because of the sheer number of applicants.

I've also worked closely with a few people from such companies. I'd say only one was a great engineer. And he definitely didn't have a high opinion of his former co-workers.

The one company whose engineers I'd probably give the benefit of the doubt would be Netflix, because they're so intentional about "performance".

[cloakandswagger]

In my mind, that does apply when you're talking about entry level software development positions. If someone is an SDE1 (or equivalent) at Facebook/Google/Amazon, I assume they're smart, determined and they studied a lot for the standard whiteboard interview.

If someone is a senior engineer at one of those companies, I assume they have a reasonable amount of talent. It's not easy to fake it or avoid expectations as a senior engineer.

[linkregister]

Agreed, the level of responsibility as a senior engineer at the "Big N" companies is generally too high to permit a mediocre engineer to survive. People get demoted from manager and staff engineer positions all the time, and it's not a career-ending event either.