Everyone's heard of Texas Instruments, but the products that make them famous aren't exactly an advertisement for attracting skilled staff. A TI calculator is less than $1 worth of functionality, $100 of "you can use this on standardized tests without being considered a cheater", and $50 of brand recognition. The whole selling point of the product is that it's just as bad now as it was 25 years ago.

Yeah, what I meant by “ever heard of Texas Instruments” was expecting that people knew more about the company than the calculators that are literally 1% of its revenue.

That’s like saying GE can’t atteact skilled staff because people only know them for their light bulbs. The sort of people that TI needs to attract will know that they are far more than just old-fashioned calculators.

I'm saying "ever heard of Texas Instruments?" isn't a good argument, because while everyone has heard of it, they know it only for making useless products that don't need or want additional design.

The fact that you've heard of it is entirely unrelated to the number of people it employs and in what capacity it employs them.

This is a place where you’d expect people to know what TI actually does, not just the calculators.

“Ever heard of X?” is an idiom that means something like “here’s an obvious example you should already know about.” It doesn’t imply that knowing about it proves something. It’s a perfectly fine argument that just says, “TI exists and attracts educated employees.”

TI makes a lot more than calculators. But you’re right, nothing as interesting to the highly educated as yet another photo sharing app.