My experience at Google was that the secret sauce wasn't that it was full of geniuses. It's that everyone was _reliably_ competent and very smart. It's hard to

My experience at Google was that the secret sauce wasn't that it was full of geniuses. It's that everyone was _reliably_ competent and very smart. It's hard to overstate how valuable that certainty is, and how impressive it is to manage that at scale. It enables an entirely new world of employer-employee relationships, including their famous transparency and policies that could (and would) be abused by people too dumb to understand coordination problems. The cost of this is of course going to be plenty of false negatives. (Bear in mind they were a fifth of their current size when I was there, so I don't know how much this applies anymore)