alt Hacker NewsI think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?
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> I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have...
This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.
I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.