I know a bunch of engineers who have worked at the giants. IMO they've all lost their luster. They grew too big. You can only fight regression to the mean for so long. Law of large numbers or whatever.<p>The best teams I worked with were small. When you only have 7 engineers its easy to make sure they're brilliant. You get to 100 and its nearly impossible. X hires his buddy Y because they're friends. One of them gets to management. Suddenly you have a whole team of mediocre engineers. Nobody wants to fire a whole team just because they're not superstars. Soon everything regresses to the mean. IMO, every big company has average engineers.<p>People hire others like themselves, but you get enough people and the personalities (and skill) blur into the whole spectrum<p>They pay a lot so you won't leave, spill their secrets and compete with their monopolies. Not because they're hot shit