Definitely - I am a internet randomer, nothing I (or others) say should be taken with anything less than a truck full of salt.
I would trust that a DE in GOOG knows how to leverage their team in the most efficient / useful way.
My point isn't that very smart / productive engineers don't exist (they definitely do), but that the meme of the dev in the corner who sits in the dark, and spews out golden code, without talking to anyone else on the team is actively harmful for our industry, especially in the smaller startup R&D teams that the current batch of publicity about them comes from.
> Again, I don't know your team, but I would doubt there is no-one on your team you can teach.
What would I teach them? I can go into an unknown codebase in a new domain and solve problems quicker and cleaner than the team who wrote the code. There is no secret knowledge I posses, no bag of tricks I apply, I just see the code, figure out what happens and solve it. If I could reliably teach that to people then I could become the richest man on earth.
My skills are good enough to reach a decent position as an IC, nothing to brag about really, but they aren't worthless either.