The problem is far more nuanced. The top individuals can be extremely productive and worth every penny, but most companies don't need top talent (they write mu

The problem is far more nuanced. The top individuals can be extremely productive and worth every penny, but most companies don't need top talent (they write mundane software that requires plugging some custom code to a framework) and can't even identify top talent, because it takes top-talent to spot top-talent. The best they can hope is just avoiding hiring the worst developers. > But the top 20% of engineers is not that much better than the middle 60%. Wrong. But since companies wouldn't be able to tell a difference, you might as well think it's true and be better off. > An average engineer can do almost anything a top engineer can, but for a much lower price. I've seen things that the company struggles for years being solved in a couple of weeks by a dedicated top-talent individual. But they were hard things - involving distributed systems, hard performance and data requirements, complex architectures etc. Things that "medium 60%" simply can't solve. But 90% of work in a typical company is actually nothing like that. And if you give top-talent a task to write some mundane business logic they might produce somewhat better code, somewhat faster, but it will be 2x tops, and possibly even less than 1x, because they will just not be motivated. So you have to know what kind of engineering your company is doing and hire matching developers.