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.<p>If you are hard working, then you do something hard, and doing hard things is … well, not so smart.<p>The question you should be asking is what are the modestly average developers trying to work hard on.
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.<p>It allows you be well paid while specialising on what you enjoy. No drama.
All kinds of areas I guess…?<p>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.