Which is what people talk about here.
No-one ever mentions the fact that say, you're barred from cracking out `git clone` and making the next Linux.
It's always commercial employment, which always has been and I am willing to bet always will be primarily a political field.
Obviously Google doesn't have the best devs - or at least I bloody well hope they don't - because they're mostly working on ad conversion shite. That excludes a ton of people I know right off the bat.
There’s no proof that they are but there’s also no proof that they aren’t
[for the sake of argument] -- yes, there is a method, if you want to find out the top few best engineers. Look at their experience. Jeff Dean, Linus, John Carmak. I think my algorithm fulfills the letter of your search criteria by finding a few 10X engineers in an ocean of regular people.
Unfortunately, the 10X (or arguably, 100X in this case) engineers may not be enough or not be interested in the job opening you have.
There is no proven method for sorting a pile of candidates such that the absolute best engineers will float to the top. In the case of high-profile employers, a significant percentage of hires will be those who have trained themselves specifically to beat the hiring process at that company. Those people aren’t the absolute best software engineers.