I've wondered what it'd be like to have a company that capped its growth at around 500 people, but made damn sure that those 500 were among the brightest in the world. Would it be an innovation think tank? Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done? Or would they just automate all the drudge work away?

I imagine it might be a little like RenTech in the financial world, which according to Wikipedia has only 275 employees and $23B in assets under management, for roughly $100M/employee. Wonder how that would translate to an organization focused around building actual products for people.

Theres also Valve Software (read their lovely handbook! http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf). They (to my knowledge) only hire folks who're at senior grade in terms of their skills. Also Valve software just generally sounds like an amazing work environment.

aside/caveat: I'm aiming to create just such an organization (operationally structured a la Valve) in terms of caliber of folks in NYC with WellPosed. I'm settling for nothing less than having an organization dedicated to building tools/products meant to make innovation happen faster on our wee world. I'm starting with fixing machine learning / numerical computation, BUT done right, rather than automagic bullshit everyone in "big data" keeps jerking off to the press :)

It looks like I'll be able to get things off the ground sans investors too (which is kinda key for what I want to do forever). Any NYC area senior grade awesome folks who like work broadly deep across math, cs, engineering things nicely and sane work expectations etc a la the organization referenced above, shoot me an email and chat, Please

I'm working to create something special that I want to last forever, and I need the most amazing people on the planet to make it happen :)

(pardon my reply turning self promoting, but I'm deadly serious about what i'm doing, and its exactly that sort of place i'm aiming to create)

(also: your hypothetical lots of smart people not getting anything done is called a circle jerk, not a business that could successfully recruit amazing people and retain them.)

Ahem. Rather than automagic bullshit, could you just do machine learning which handles multiple data-types.

That would be a big change for the ML crowd to have to deal with real world, multiple typed, dirty data. Earthshattering, I know. (Yes, we've already spoken by email. Best of luck on your adventures)

I said the other folks are doing automagic BS, :-)

Yup, Thats one of the problems I'm solving "right" (or nearly so) in the basic alpha as it gets in shape.

Thanks! Were you the unicorn email dude?

> Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done?

[Maybe] Not if a couple of those brightest 500 have enough respect for and include amongst them a couple of the world's most dedicated and efficient administrative assistants.

Not sure what you are complaining about here. :) Facebook has 1/4 the number of employees Yahoo has and less than 1/16 that of Google. It's smaller than my high school.

They'll get just as big unless they make a conscious decision to avoid it.

> He gets programming better than probably any BigCo tech CEO and yet he made the same damn mistake of hiring thousands upon thousands of programmers instead of just getting the 10X Programmers and having 1/10th as many while paying them 2x as much.

What makes you think that Facebook doesn't hire every 10x programmer it can? What makes you think that Google doesn't?

After they hire every 10x programmer they can, what do you think they should do? They've still got money to spend and stuff to do. Are you seriously suggesting that they don't spend that money to do those things?

Of course they hire 10X programmers, but they also hire 1X programmers. I'm suggesting that they could only hire 10X programmers and pay them 2X more. Twice the industry salary (~$250k/yr), nothing but 10X programmers, and an amazing campus would make Facebook unbelievably desirable for most programmers. Not even Google or Apple could compete because they still hire massive numbers of 1X programmers.

> I'm suggesting that they could only hire 10X programmers and pay them 2X more.

Why do you think that Google/Apple/Facebook don't pay 10X programmers >2X more?

In my experience, admittedly at other companies, the 10X programmers do make a lot more. Yet there's still more work and more money to spend. What should they do with that work and money?

You're making a lot of claims about salary structures. Where are you getting your information?

What software engineering organizations do you have experience with?

I ask because I'm beginning to suspect that your actual knowledge in this area is even less than that of the typical Harvard Business Review author....

For those of us who aren't those 10x programmers though I appreciate the opportunity to work at a company like Facebook...

To be clear, I'm not claiming I'd get hired there if it was run like that. I'd still rather see a company run like that.