This is BS. I know how the interview process works. All these big corporations optimize their recruitment processes around pedigree (matched to the curriculum of top universities). They don't look at track record at all; when track record is a far better indication of future performance. That's why their engineers are so incompetent and it costs so much money for them to produce anything.
They have become so incompetent that they don't even have the talent necessary to know what talent looks like when recruiting.
Corporate engineers will never hire other engineers who are better than them (for political reasons), so the engineering talent in these companies has been degrading for years as the bureaucracy and internal politics has increased.
You're comparing corporate big tech to what, the lean and scrappy traditional military contractors? The level of incompetence in the military sector (private and public) is unfathomable unless you experience it in person.
> when track record is a far better indication of future performance
Not all experience transfers over and developing completely new technology (both hardware and software in combination) is extremely hard. I think you're vastly underestimating the value people get from these university degrees when they're actually pioneering new things and actually learned the topics they were taught.
I know people who work at Microsoft and I can see what kind of software solutions they produce. Of course they do produce some good stuff, they have a few pockets of talent. They've always been strong with gaming and IDEs for example. But anything related to web technologies is just a failure. They don't understand the web. Most of the business they get is due to legacy reasons (e.g. companies who use Azure because their legacy software won't run on anything else). They just come up with solutions and then try to forcibly shove it down developers' throats.
One reason why they suck at web is because they suck at interoperability. They can't do open source properly. They don't know how to optimize software for maximum compatibility. This is because vendor lock-in is the enemy of compatibility and interoperability. Vendor lock-in is in their DNA; everything they do is about lock-in. Their software is all about complex, rigid interfaces; this is how they achieve lock-in but it makes it difficult to integrate their solutions into third party software (high friction, high entry barriers) and difficult to maintain/update.
Look at past software they've worked on, ask questions about it. If they have open source stuff, look at their code. Ask them about their design decisions; why they designed things a certain way.
