Top dev talent is overrated imo. Not to mention almost every dev thinks they are top tier even if most of us are just mediocre.

> Top dev talent is overrated

The problem is that talent is defined by hindsight: “When the company was acquired by Facebook, it had 35 engineers” https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to work on a successful product due to a successful market, we call them talented. If A flamed out due to unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A.

But technical talent is definitely not overrated - because there are too many examples where talented teams have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.

I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year, if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.

I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular' engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top' talent.