| > I definitely feel like there’s this illusion of tech innovation coming from these big companies that suck up all the tech talent, but at end of day the best and brightest are working on optimizing ad clicks (FB, Goog) or getting people to buy crap (Amazon) or working on incremental hardware improvements (Apple). That seems ignorant and simplistic (or maybe just using a definition of "innovation" that is less generic than I have in mind). The vast majority of employees at those companies do NOT work on the main money generating product, it's such a small number compared to the rest that it's a running joke inside companies "hey you guys make the money, we burn it". I feel that there has been made a lot of progress in many areas coming from people working for those companies. Not saying that maybe more progress could have been made if those people worked for smaller companies or for academia but I completely disagree that big tech hiring lots of smart people just automatically means they're all spending time doing some "useless" (to your mind) thing. Some of the very few things I'm aware of: - large improvements to distributed systems - large software building/testing frameworks - maintenance, scheduling, utilization of large datacenter hardware and networks - all sorts of specific features being pushed in open source projects (like the Linux kernel) to support these companies' usecases There's a running theme in most of those things of course, it's all to do with operating large datacenters and that makes sense (and I'd argue that without having had bigtech it would be much less likely to have the business support/money to work on such problems). |