What would your job ad say if it was designed to solicit applications from 20 to 22 year old males willing to work long hours for peanuts?
"Come be a frankly mediocre programmer writing pedestrian code to solve unimportant problems"?
A job, like any other product, has to be sold. Beer ads don't say "makes you stupid and fat; occasionally ruins lives; it's going to kill some of you; no, really, you will not have beautiful women drape themselves over you, that virtually never to men sitting at home playing Xbox and drinking beer does not make it substantially more likely." For a reason. Similarly, there's the intimation of a cultural/status/etc component to the product offering for working as an engineer at one of these places. (n.b. Not unique to working at them, incidentally. i-bankers, Japanese salarymen, nurses, and PhD candidates in English all get a sales pitch -- in no case is it totally 100% representative of the actual job because, hey, sales pitch.)
"Come be a frankly mediocre programmer writing pedestrian code to solve unimportant problems"?
A job, like any other product, has to be sold. Beer ads don't say "makes you stupid and fat; occasionally ruins lives; it's going to kill some of you; no, really, you will not have beautiful women drape themselves over you, that virtually never to men sitting at home playing Xbox and drinking beer does not make it substantially more likely." For a reason. Similarly, there's the intimation of a cultural/status/etc component to the product offering for working as an engineer at one of these places. (n.b. Not unique to working at them, incidentally. i-bankers, Japanese salarymen, nurses, and PhD candidates in English all get a sales pitch -- in no case is it totally 100% representative of the actual job because, hey, sales pitch.)