Indeed, I work for the company you're thinking of (check out our development blog and you'll see me as the author of about 70% of the posts). Getting good peop

Indeed, I work for the company you're thinking of (check out our development blog and you'll see me as the author of about 70% of the posts). Getting good people to work for a software company writing enterprise software is hard enough, due to factors I've mentioned elsewhere (it's low profile, you're building systems you yourself wouldn't need or use, the deployment model is rough). Getting good people to work doing software stuff at a non-software company is much harder, I'd say. Even if you had great working conditions and got to use innovative processes and technology to do things, which not many non-software companies do, you're still going to get hit the "talent attracts talent" problem. Talented people want to work with other talented people; otherwise it's a vicious cycle where the best people leave and cause the rest of the good people to leave, and new good people that come in don't want to stick around. The only real way to combat it is to start with a bunch of talented people and then keep your standards high; otherwise, the feedback loop spins you down towards mediocrity in a hurry.