Yes, but the downside is even highly accomplished engineers feel unworthy. For example, when I started in 2008, they said everybody should make a "Google Resume" (ongoing list of all the stuff you did at Google) and linked to Jeff's as an example.

He rewrote the entire indexing pipeline at a critical time enabling Google's rapid growth... created mapreduce... helped create bigtable & gfs... wrote the search engine that ran for over a decade... numerous improvements to search and ads quality (back in the days when search and ads quality meant something)... and that was just the first few years.

> It shows that engineers are valued

yep

> and a meritocracy exists

not necessarily. It shows the system got one excellent engineer to an appropriate position. But it doesn't show that the system isn't promoting bozos too, and keeping other excellent engineers down.