Sampling bias? ;-) I've worked in famous companies. I've worked in obscure companies. I've met amazing programmers in both. I've met horrible programmers in

Sampling bias? ;-) I've worked in famous companies. I've worked in obscure companies. I've met amazing programmers in both. I've met horrible programmers in both. Most are somewhere in between. There are good programmers everywhere. Grabbing a couple (ideally including a senior dev) of really excellent people will go a long way improving your team. But you need to do more than advertise and interview to get these people. You need to go out into your community, participate, and create a reputation. You need to work on your internal processes and be interesting enough for an excellent dev to be interested in you. My advice for a small up and coming team is to spend the cash to hire a well known senior consultant with a good track record. From there you can get your culture set up and you can make contacts with other good devs that the consultant knows. After that it is really just hard work to hone everything that you do so that good people think that it will be a worthwhile career move to spend time with you. If your management strategy is to throw money at talent and hope that it gels, I think you will have a lot of trouble. Once you have talent, it's important that they are set up to succeed. This is more than just turning them loose on a project. IMHO, good teams have many dimensions to them. You don't necessarily need (or want) to have a superstar in every position. It can be good, but it requires a corresponding level of proficiency from management to get them all working together well. If you are worried about the one that got away in your interview process, then I think it is a sign that you have very much bigger problems that you need to deal with. If you tell me that this is common in the Valley, it will not be something that surprises me ;-)