Pardon the apparently naive question: are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet? That is what I would think but it seems like I am horribly wrong.

Could you elaborate some more, please?

I’ve never worked at one, but I interviewed at HRT. The interviewers were all quite kind, and more importantly to me, they asked difficult questions relevant to the role. Specifically, the role was for DBs, and the questions (beyond “can you do some basic coding”) were all low-level RDBMS or Linux. I hate Leetcode, doubly so when I will never, ever be using those skills on the job.

Given that those places are also doing stuff like writing their own network stack to reduce latency, I get the impression that they know their shit.

    > are those places not filled with the most horrible vultures on the planet?

Why do you think this?

On the contrary, I believe this is a misinformation widely spread by non-technical people about their grit. They actually do some really interesting(definition may differ from yours) work and paces are very sane.

However, given their pay and other contractual limitations, it can be very attractive and fiercely competitive to land a job unless you are really good. Hence the the fake “vultures” rumor to gate keep.

P.S. Worked at one briefly and figured that I will become unemployable in regular market soon if I ever plan to leave… and not work in this industry anymore.

Why would you be unemployable?