I disagree, somewhat.

Many SAY they want elite engineers.

But what they really want is someone who can ship the worst possible muck as fast as inhumanly possible, and still manage to help keep the lawsuits down to a dull roar of just multiple billions of dollars per year. And they want to pay these developers literally zero.

Which is why they all thought that tokenmaxxing would be such a good thing, since it could be used to build virtual engineers that literally cost them absolutely no money at all.

Yes, I worked at Amazon. I know that culture. And they had some seriously elite engineers, at least when I started there.

I also did a six-month stint at Apple Retail Software Engineering a few years earlier. They also had some seriously elite engineers there. Honest-to-goodness real-deal 10x types. And they frequently got yanked from one project to another based on whatever the whim was of Steve Jobs, or whomever was in charge. And they were constantly being pushed to actually produce 100x, not just 10x.