I had a rebuttal in mind but I wasn't going to write it today until later when I unexpectedly wandered upon a section from one of pg's essays while showing them

I had a rebuttal in mind but I wasn't going to write it today until later when I unexpectedly wandered upon a section from one of pg's essays while showing them to a friend who was interested in startups: "Clumping Along with interesting problems, what good hackers like is other good hackers. Great hackers tend to clump together-- sometimes spectacularly so, as at Xerox Parc. So you won't attract good hackers in linear proportion to how good an environment you create for them. The tendency to clump means it's more like the square of the environment. So it's winner take all. At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero." The essay then goes to lengths about Google. Jeff Dean has enough clout that he can just skip the interview process and get immediately hired by any company he wants. I even have friends who have pulled this off who aren't even nearly as capable as Jeff Dean.