Extraordinary people are extremely limited. The recruitment process is not perfect. The performance equation consists of far more than just the individual's capabilities. Every variable is subject to diminishing returns upon investment.
Microsoft study aside (I couldn't find it either, mostly redirects to Teams), there are tons of studies coming out over and over pointing out how capable the ordinary person is when put in the right environment. We see this every day too, a complete "nobody" rises to fame within a year of dedicated work, to levels most people would claim "you need 5-10 years to be at that level", if not more. And these people aren't doing it in unimpressive ways like making a meme game or a joke website or whatever, no; they are making things which put companies with millions of dollars in budget to shame. If individuals can do this on their own accord, so too can a team with a specialist open to teach others, in work far less glamorous and difficult.
I've yet to see open source code from FAANG or other big players that looks like it was done by a genius. it's just professionals who know how to read documentations, and know how to write clean code and know how to work in a good engineering process.
also when you're building an app (web, mobile, SAAS ...) I really really doubt you need or want 'extraordinary' people ..
Then you add on top of that, companies tend to give pretty strong incentives to do their work anyway (you know, survival and luxuries). Even "cash-strapped" ones tend to pay well over median.
I'm skeptical of what Microsoft considers an "average contributor" considering they were known to have a pretty high bar for recruiting (they were notorious for rigorous algorithmic interviews even back in the 90's). And the comp was also pretty strong especially considering stock performance back then.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
For those interested, Zoho[1] is doing this in a pretty big way. I had been lucky to be one of those very few outside-people that Zoho had agreed worked with. I even visited one of their location in a very remote corner of India and love what they are doing. They can practically change the landscape, education, and family wellbeing of an entire village/town.
With remote work it’s going to be extremely common for teams to “get together” a couple of times per year in person. This doesn’t seem like a bad thing? It’s fine not to like it but it seems valuable.
The biggest boon to a company retreat has always been to come and see a new place but then I've always wished I could share that experience with my family instead.
Have you tried raising more? What went wrong?
> we can't pay FANG
So you're not paying market salary.
People who want the full FAANG experience are welcome to chase/choose that. This article and comment thread is about a hypothesis that there are very good developers who don’t want that full FAANG experience and how employers might meet them at another point on the multi-dimensional frontier defined by (company, interesting problems, pay, colleagues, BS, on-call, work conditions, tech approach, remote, etc.).
Different points in that space have different market rates. The rate to work 3 days/week, full remote, with three other great colleagues on a project personally meaningful to you is different than a 5-day per week job on-site in an open bullpen pushing software to wring more value from a warehouse worker or target ads 0.0001% better.
Don't go for the big names / nba level, don't even go for the second league candidates, go for 3rd and 4th and find people who're looking to do a great job (there is a lot of them) and give them the environment to do so.
I think Microsoft had a study about creating effective teams from ordinary people, and I've seen it a lot at my company. make sure that you have a good engineering culture and people who want to learn and do a good job, you will end up with superstars.
also, there is loads of engineers doing shit jobs and dying to work on something a bit more interesting or more rewarding.