Agree with you here. Some of the worst engineers I’ve worked with have been at Google, especially the younger newer ones. There’s a combination of impostor syndrome driving people to dogma (thus lack of thinking) as well as annoying arrogance towards anything that not orthodox.

There are of course many great engineers as well (especially the more OG ones) but the ability spread was way larger than any other company I’ve been at. I think it’s something about its cultural image and incentive structure...

Seems like your key metric is “hours spent at desk”. By that measure, you are probably correct.

No, my metric is output per engineer which losely correlates with hours spent at desk. The output quality and quantity was the lowest at Google

And yet if there is one thing these tech giants are famous for it's output per employee, measured in dollars.

This is something common in all really profitable companies and tech is merely the best example. Oil "tech" is another. Financial tech is yet another.

Europe, where engineers don't seem to be paid well is very much lacking in the sort of very profitable companies we see elsewhere. And even Baidu is known for paying very well (relatively for China, but even in absolute terms they're paying ... certainly Amazon level).

I see a few indications this may not be a coincidence. Big, huge, very profitable companies ... pay their employees well. Europe, clearly, would rather fade into non-importance. Currently Germany is a bit of an exception but if Tesla does take off, how long will that last?

Very loosely for example I was reviewing a well known uk job site just spending a couple of hours to check the site out

And I diagnosed a serious problem and got a fix actioned - the problem had cost them > 500,000 k in less than a week.

How are you measuring this other than the hours-spent-at-desk metric? Quality and quantity of what output?

When I was an engineering manager at Google, my group would look more closely at impact than we would at output. In fact, if the output ended up being more technical debt than durable improvement (the proverbial "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!" effect that Dilbert spelled out), we would count that against the engineer's evaluated performance. And it would usually take more than 2 months to determine when that was the case.