I guess it depends how we define "smart". To me, smart means getting things done and being able to see trade-offs and the bigger picture. Something that I have seen lacking in a lot of FAANGs employee that I worked with through open-source.
The open source communities I've been involved in had a really high density of smart and motivated people that saw trade offs, maybe higher than FAANG, so it's likely your bar is quite high.
I just mean, I've worked at startups where people could say, write a for loop, but didn't understand how threads or concurrency worked at all, or why you'd want to use a set vs a list etc.
At least FAANG is pretty good at filtering the latter type of folks.
