I met a guy who claimed to work at Microsoft and didn't seem terribly smart. He looked scruffy and had the sort of bulky muscles you get by working out a lot. He reminded me a lot of friends I had growing up - nice, but not educated and not too smart. I figured he got in somehow when they were doing lots of hiring.
It wasn't until I worked with him for a while and got to know him (months of seeing him every day) that I realized just how smart he was. He wrote his own lisp interpreter for fun. Then he wrote programs that would run in that lisp interpreter. He examined the foundations of computing and invented computing devices - again, for fun. And he knew a million things about, well, a million things. He almost never mentioned any of this, you had to ask or catch him at a time he was excited about it to find out.
Talking to him in general, and you'd think he was just an enjoyable guy to hang around, and hadn't bothered going to university. When you happened to get him talking about math or engineering or computers - well, that's when you realized he was a frigging genius. And had gone to university.
Are there people who aren't that smart at Microsoft and Google? Sure, they hired a lot of people, I'm sure they run the gamut in terms of brains. But if they survive there for a year or two? It seems likely they're able to keep up with what looks like pretty smart crowds to me. That should say something about them.
But still... don't judge a book by their cover, no matter where they work.
Read other answers by John L. Miller on Quora:
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How do Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple and Quora treat technical debt?
- In large companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, is there a difference in pay in software engineering for having a Masters or a Bachelors? Does GPA make a difference in pay as well?
- Do big companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Quora, etc., play pranks on their employees?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2a00Ec0
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