"If it's so easy to identify prospective great developers, why not try to recruit them?" 1. Who says that companies don't try. We can only observe that they ar

"If it's so easy to identify prospective great developers, why not try to recruit them?" 1. Who says that companies don't try. We can only observe that they are not too successful at it. But that might also just mean that there's many companies competing for few employees. And if you can get the same salary somewhere else, who would still go to Facebook? 2. Great at work doesn't mean great character. I'm pretty sure that the original team building Android was highly skilled. But their personalities also appear highly controversial. Not every company can stomach the fallout from hiring someone like that. 3. There is an incentive to keep quiet if you succeed. Once you publicly announce that you succeeded in hiring a truly outstanding employee, you are pretty much guaranteed to have recruiters try to steal your employee away from you. 4. The best jobs for these people are research and prototypes for future products. As such, you can be sure that companies will have draconian NDAs in place to prevent their top employees from taking about what they do. So they'll be mostly invisible on the internet. 5. If you look around in indie circles, you'll find many companies where one person does legal, marketing, and all product development. I'd guess those are the 10x-ers who value freedom higher than money.