shrug I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Of course nobody wants to build the single most important part of a company around a single person. My point

shrug I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Of course nobody wants to build the single most important part of a company around a single person. My point is that for some deep niches, building entire teams around it, and pulling away the people who know most about those things in order to have them 'mentor' a bunch of people who in no way will be able to reach the require depth for a long time just doesn't make sense. And from my understanding, it is this sort of situation the GP was referring to. I don't think, and from my experience which of course suffers from insufficiently large sample size, this situation is not all that uncommon. (as an aside, I especially object to 'taking advantage of a diversity of perspectives/approaches' being a universal good/requirement. I have seen many cases where having one person just get on with it absolutely beat the design committee. But again this perspective is probably skewed by being involved mostly in deeply specialized numerical software, where exceptional value mostly comes from having both deep domain expertise in something unrelated to computing and deep technical/programming knowledge)