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Comment by mjwalshe | Hacker News Reader

Joel I take it you mean the 1% that apply to you? Small companies (dont take this persoanly) are neaver going to be the first point of call for the true top 1%.

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This is decidedly not true. While I wouldn't be so vain as to call myself the top 1% of developers, I've gotten job offers from most major software companies, but one of my criteria for where I accept a job is "do you have fewer than 50 people?"

I want to write code all day, and I want to work on interesting and very hard problems. While this exists at large companies, there are very few jobs at top tier small companies where this doesn't exist.

That seems backwards. At a big company like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, engineers code all day and industry-leading problems. At a small company, there's a lot of setting up servers and customizing UI and evaluating 3rd-party software packages.

There's plenty of that at large companies too.

Setting up a server in a back room in your office is a much different task than setting up a server at Big Co. scale though, they basically aren't even the same task at all.

I was more implying that if you want to work at the top Organization in the field places like CERN and Bell labs are going to attract the brightest and not a small me to start-up.

I would consider an attempt by a senior Intel guys to split and do a new Traitorous 8 a different case as you would need a huge investment.

writing code is the easy part solving the solution you have been asked to solve

Did you read the article? One of the major points is that it's not just the top 1% of the applicants.

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