[cryptica]

This is true, but it also applies to the tech sector as a whole. The engineers of big tech companies tend to look down on all other engineers on the basis that they happen to work for financially successful companies which have market monopolies (and are propped up by easy money from government money printers via huge contracts and exposure to public markets).

Never mind that their processes are a bureaucratic hell and it takes 100 of their engineers to implement the same thing which just 1 really good engineer working for a startup could implement in the same amount of time - Look at Whatsapp as an example; before they were acquired, they had hundreds of millions of users and only 55 engineers in total... Facebook has over 10K of them and gets a lot less done...

Talent outside of big tech is not unusual; it is the norm, but most startups which are full of talented engineers don't go on to become Whatsapp because the market doesn't care about technical talent above a certain (rather low) threshold.

Everything is a lottery. Any appearance of meritocracy is an illusion crafted by media and PR firms in an effort to keep the system from falling apart. Only extremely lucky, delusional outliers think that the narratives make sense nowadays.... Through a lot of people who know that the narratives don't make sense still pretend that they do.