In an otherwise unremarkable WSJ piece about the silly bidding war going on among Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google for top scientists and engineers, there is this fascinating rationalization from Alan Eustace of Google:
One top-notch engineer is worth “300 times or more than the average,” explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering. He says he would rather lose an entire incoming class of engineering graduates than one exceptional technologist. Many Google services, such as Gmail and Google News, were started by a single person, he says.
Related posts:
Measured by sheer productivity, I’ve worked for years with a recognition of “10x guys.” There is little question that a group of 10 A+ players sitting in a room in the Valley are as productive as a hundred or more average folks elsewhere. But 3000?
Interesting chart on Palo Alto real estate that you can see by clicking on “mike simonsen”
If you are a student of technical analysis, you can see that a pretty bearish set up has taken place. In August, Mike’s chart shows prices breaking below the key 90 day moving average. Then the prices keep moving back up to the MA, but failing. The moving average has begun to trend down as well. If you buy this kind of analysis, a break of the median price low set in early 2005 would indicate further weakness.
Interesting chart on Palo Alto real estate that you can see by clicking on “mike simonsen”
If you are a follower of technical analysis, you can see that a pretty bearish set up has taken place. In August, Mike’s chart shows prices breaking below the key 90 day moving average. Then the prices keep moving back up to the MA, but failing. The moving average has begun to trend down as well. If you buy this kind of analysis, a break of the median price low set in early 2005 would indicate further weakness.
Mike Simonsen: “There is little question that a group of 10 A+ players sitting in a room in the Valley are as productive as a hundred or more average folks elsewhere. But 3000?”
The additional multiplier could reasonably come from higher-order productivity–that is, knowing what not to produce, and not wasting resources producing it.
That said, however, I don’t see Gmail as a particularly good example of that phenomenon. I think any random A+ techie could have put that together.