Whew - even with your empty caveat against saying what I’m about to say:
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.
I’m writing from a faang office with a few decades of experience. I know some people in aerospace. They’re on average smarter than 4/5ths of my colleagues (who are also clever).
I’m much more junior, but to exchange anecdotes, I think it’s difficult to accurately say that people in FAANG are less, equal, or more intelligent than people in aerospace. To define intelligent, I will use the everyday definition that mixes speed of learning with the ability to solve hard problems (acknowledging that the academic definition of intelligence is different).
For one, I anecdotally know people in FAANG who were smart by effectively “studying for the test” by focusing more on leetcode than projects/intellectual exploration. In contrast, the people I know who went into aerospace tended to have a genuine interest in physics (and some with more interest in philosophy), and had more experience with projects (e.g. worked on an aerospace team in university), with many of them having little-to-know experience with software development.
Interestingly, the aerospace people I know anecdotally happened to be better at soft skills/networking for getting into companies, whereas the FAANG people focused on leetcode for admissions. After getting into a company, also from my anecdotal experience, more FAANG people focused on metrics/compensation, whereas more aerospace people tended to focus more on the mastery of the craft. I acknowledge that my anecdotes shouldn’t be generalized, but it aligns with the motivations of many people looking to get into each company (it seems more people go into FAANG for compensation/prestige, whereas more people go into aerospace for the passion).
So, I would say that people from both categories tended to be very smart at learning quickly and solving hard problems, though anecdotally, the aerospace people seemed to be generally more intellectually curious. Then again, perhaps the aerospace people were better at soft skills/presenting themselves so they appeared smarter, whereas the FAANG people didn’t focus on presenting themselves as intelligently. For limitations, note that the people I’m thinking of are at the junior level.
In any case, I don’t think one can conclusively say that people in FAANG have more/less/the same intelligence as people in aerospace companies, though maybe one can tentatively say that people who go into aerospace tend to be more curious and interested in mastery of one’s profession (versus material compensation).
I've worked on a large scale website everyone knows. There are lots of interesting problems, and lots of super clever people who solve them in clever ways, but it's not literal rocket science.
Designing reusable rockets and launching hundreds of them into space for profit, is more complicated and requires a different caliber of frankly higher IQ worker, than building and maintaining the existing Twitter.
Not that there aren’t some smart web people, obviously.