firms are trying to outhire each other, like talent is some magic wand that can replace compelling products. Where do you think the compelling products come fr

firms are trying to outhire each other, like talent is some magic wand that can replace compelling products. Where do you think the compelling products come from? There are plenty of companies that take the view that you seem to be advocating - that there are employees who "create" and other employees who just turn the wheels and implement those ideas. Your average fortune 500 company is just like that. The engineers working there pretty consistently complain that the software dev team isn't respected, and isn't sees as producing things of value, or providing a competitive advantage. Those companies believe that thevakue isn't in the oroduct/idea and the execution is easy and ought to be cheap. Which is fine, as long as you never need to do anything that requires significant technical skills. Because such environments force out anyone who thinks that they gave more to offer than simply churning out cookie-cutter, mediocre code. Their are ways to build successful teams that don't require that everyone is top 10%, but the notion that you just need compelling product ideas and a bunch of average developers to implement them is pretty common place, and rarely produces exceptional products.