You are confusing "top" engineers/employees with top-technical employees, that is not the same at all. If you staff a company with geniuses in R&D and gray mediocrities in all the other departments I am pretty sure you know what will happen. You want great CAD designers, PM, QA, logistics, marketing people? Pay them accordingly and not like mediocrities.It is pretty obvious you have no idea what you are talking about.

Either that or he is unwittingly expressing the underlying problem with intel's corporate culture that got them into this mess.

Good engineering is about finding reusable solutions to problems, it's not manual labor.

If you have good engineers the relationship between amount of work and number of engineers needed is non-linear.

> You don’t need top engineers for that.

Top-tier companies have to pay top-tier compensation.

Unethical companies have to pay top-tier compensation. You don't have to pay Google/FB bucks if you don't have sex scandals and employee retaliations in the news every day, or if the students you're recruiting don't think you're brainwashing their grandparents.

That's a very weak idea and unhelpful. Many companies pay excellently and aren't even connected to advertising.

If you are/become a leader, this mentality can seriously hurt your org. Pay for the talent you want to attract and keep. Pay generously for performance.