I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.

I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.

Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.

Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.

There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.

Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.

All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.

> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux

Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.

I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.

Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.