If you feel a great sense of accomplishment from being hired at Amazon, that's fine. If you believe that you are a superior engineer on the basis that you were hired by Amazon (or Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.), you are making a very bad assumption. Some current engineers and alumni believe this fallacy because it supports their beliefs about themselves. It's a trap that stifles their growth. It's as if people aren't aware that these companies desperately need engineers.
I actually think you have it backwards. A lot of those engineers probably feel the opposite because those companies have some amount of truly amazing engineers that those other employees get to work with. For instance I'm like 4 day old garbage compared next to the technical leaders / senior engineers at these companies.
One of my friends used to work right next to some of the engineers that initially created EC2. I'd be feeling more like I'm not worthy because I haven't created anything as cool or worth near as much.
> compared next to the technical leaders / senior engineers at these companies.
You feel that way because you actually didn't do anything you consider cool or you didn't do anything others consider cool? I did a lot of cool stuff; not really interested if others find that cool or not and certainly, without meeting the perceived 10x engineers you are referring to, I am not going to blindly say I would somehow rank lower as an engineer because I don't work in one of those companies or because I was not in the startup phase of one of those companies (you know, at the time when you didn't have to do those silly tests and the bar or entry to jump to the top rank was lower because it was a startup).
