Elite startups and hedge funds have the best software quality. There are funds in NYC where every programmer makes more than 500k a year, some in the millions. They have people on those teams who have been programming since they were in middle school. FAANG just hire in bulk, they just want you to memorize solutions to algorithms problems, and if you can do that youre in. Some huge percentage of programmers at Google have less than three years experience. They can absorb all the bad engineers they hire, a few end up being good, who they promote to the teams actually writing the software critical to the business. The rest just write CRUD Apis and shuffle data around, using some framework written by the top 1% in the company.
One of those funds famously blew themselves up in 45 minutes, with causes including reusing an old feature flag rather than defining a new one and a complete lack of code review or incident response procedures. In all my (admittedly anecdotal) knowledge, it may be true that the top funds have the top software engineer quality, but their skills are put to use writing software that's absolutely terrible.
> Elite startups and hedge funds have the best software quality.
Most startups that I hear about have rather shitty software quality because they're focused on velocity. VCs don't care about sustainability since they don't even know whether the business is even worth sustaining.
Sure, but a truly world class programmer writes better code in a rush than a mediocre one does in a slow enterprise environment. Programming skill doenst work like that, some people are just better.
It’s a weird world. I worked at D. E. Shaw and their initial phone screen includes SAT score. I was 26 at the time and had to ask twice to be sure I’d heard the recruiter correctly. For whatever reason, that was part of the process. They were also the origin of the “every new hire must have an articulated dimension in which they are better than the median for their role and level” that Bezos later took to Amazon.
That was the most consistent top caliber colleagues I’ve ever worked with. (I’ve worked with other excellent colleagues, but Desco was uniformly very good. Our office manager had a PhD. Our recruiter had a masters degree. It was crazy.)
Probably the easiest path is to be referred in from a current employee. Next would be outstanding achievement in some academic or technical field (if applicable). You don’t have to be an autodidact or a savant. You need to be competent, intelligent, and willing to work hard and then to find a way to get a warm intro to recruiting.
