Ask HN: Which companies are considered to have the best engineers in 2017? - capocannoniere
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bsvalley
I hear terms like "developers", "coders", "resources" and all these kind of
stuff when companies talk about us. So I don't think any company has brillant
"engineers" per se. They maybe have excellent algorithm solvers on a
whiteboard. Google, Facebook, etc.

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devonkim
To be contrarian, I'll point toward financial engineering (not retail or
I-banking and such) such as Renaissance. It takes some pretty crazy and smart
people to dig into FPGAs and HDLs trying to write what would normally be CPU
based algorithms while focusing upon latency and availability as well when so
many dollars are in motion. The industry's secrecy habits make it hard to get
a fair assessment, but I've never heard of anyone incompetent at such a place
while I've heard gobs of stories of incompetent people at large tech
companies.

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SirLJ
Plus they much much better compensated compare to the typical Silicon Valley
company

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rl3
My vote is Epic Games. If you look at UE4 changelogs, the amount of
productivity is staggering.

Core engine programming is no joke either, let alone on a commercial engine
used by half the industry.

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Axsuul
There are no "best engineers". There can be, however, a "best engineer" for
the specific stage the company is at. The typical higher echelon engineer that
you'll find at the Big 4 will not necessary thrive at a early-stage startup.

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PhrosTT
My person & abritrary list of companies I consider to be 'above' the Big 4:

Stripe

Two Sigma

SpaceX

Maybe AirBnb & Netflix?

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ravitation
Google is certainly one company that's traditionally had that reputation.

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harrisreynolds
Joel Spolsky always seemed to have an aptitude for attracting great people to
Fog Creek Software. See joelonsoftware.com for a treasure trove of knowledge
if you somehow have never heard of him.

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maxxxxx
I think a better question would be which company has the best environment for
engineering? I see a lot of smart people with a lot of potential working on
crap projects.

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drewrv
I imagine this depends on how you define "best". The most
impressive/challenging work right now is probably in AR or self driving cars.
If "best" is based on code quality or productivity, well, that's kind of
subjective.

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stouset
The most glamorous right now might be AR and self-driving, but most
_challenging_ I think undersells the difficultly of problems distributed
across virtually all of software engineering.

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sidcool
In my opinion, Google and Apple.

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harrisreynolds
FYI. Big Four = Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft

I'd guess Stripe, Palantir and AirBnB would be up there too.

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JBReefer
People are downvoting you for including Palantir, which has a reputation of
over-inflating the quality of its engineers, and consistently choosing big
name schools over experience.

I don't know if it's true, when I interviewed with them they seemed very
interested even though I only took 3/4 years of a cs degree, and graduated
with a different degree from RPI. I'm just explaining their reputation.

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Madmallard
blizzard valve bethesda are probably really high up there the smartest guy i
knew at university went to work at blizzard he just made everyone around him
look bad

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kohanz
> he just made everyone around him look bad

An example of why this is so subjective. For me, the "best" engineers make
everyone around them look better. Like the star athlete that elevates the
level of play of their teammates.

One of my best friends in university was top-ranked in our class for every
year (although they discontinued the rankings shortly after my class
finished). Just a brilliant mind but without any of the social awkwardness you
might expect to accompany that. He would literally hold unofficial study
tutorials where he taught other students the course material. And it's not
like he did this because he thought he was awesome - the other students begged
him to because he could explain concepts better than some of our own profs.

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j7ake
The best engineers are probably working in academia doing research.

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nitwit005
I doubt even the academics would agree with that one.

