Facebook, according to the Times, is the pioneer of this new phenomenon, acquiring a slew of companies, killing their products, but keeping their developers. I

Facebook, according to the Times, is the pioneer of this new phenomenon, acquiring a slew of companies, killing their products, but keeping their developers. If Zuckerberg thinks that's a good strategy, then he's an idiot. When companies pull that stunt, morale at the acquired startup turns to shit and people only stay because of their golden-handcuff earnouts (note to all: never take a deal with an earnout; you will probably be fired 1 day short of the cutoff). Usually, what happens is that the acquiring company finds a way not to make good on the earnout, firing the original founders for "performance" three days before they could earn out, so then they rightfully get pissed and talent-raid their ex-employer for their next venture. If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers? I'd ask for 3 brilliant engineers and 400 mediocre ones. The 400 mediocre ones would be able to support an enterprise system that might be ugly but would bring in lots of money: far more money than a small startup could bring in except with a lot of luck. I'd hire a half-decent MBA to make (and run) a profitable company out of these 400 mediocre engineers and spend maybe an hour a week actively managing it. With the surplus, I'd fund a 4-person startup (the three brilliant people, plus me as a relative hanger-on) and do something awesome. All that said, the relationship between size and effectiveness is weird in technology. Friction and integration difficulty grow faster-than-linearly in terms of the number of people on a software project. There are some types of projects where a few good developers can do very well, but where an arbitrarily large number of mediocre ones just won't be able to do it. For example, you can throw 400 mediocre engineers at an enterprise product and make billions per year, but if you throw 400 mediocre engineers at the design of a concurrent programming language, you're going to get nothing. After examining the careers of more than 1,000 star analysts at Wall Street investment banks If you're talking about performance and not political luck, there's no such thing as a "star analyst". It's a braindead, utterly subordinate job with no room for creativity or ingenuity. By the way, "analysts" don't analyze anything; it's just the default title given out of college.