The smartest developers are working on crud apps at a faang, it’s the smartest thing to do. It’s easy as shit and pays a ton. If you are smart, that’s what you do.
If you are hard working, then you do something hard, and doing hard things is … well, not so smart.
The question you should be asking is what are the modestly average developers trying to work hard on.
Sitting on the terrace of a villa in Sweden overseeing a beautiful lake, having finished all client work for the year two months ago, working as an individual contributor at a faang does not strike me as a very smart thing to do if easy life is the goal.
Depends what you mean by smart? A lot of smart people enjoy technical & mathematical problems as opposed to business, hustling and risk taking. So they are probably on the career track at large tech and finance companies.
It allows you be well paid while specialising on what you enjoy. No drama.
From CRUD apps over to cryptography (e.g. WireGuard, Signal, Noise), kernel hacking, programming language design, DBMS development (SQLite, PostgreSQL), app development (e.g. Chrome, Firefox) etc etc.
If you are hard working, then you do something hard, and doing hard things is … well, not so smart.
The question you should be asking is what are the modestly average developers trying to work hard on.