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Comment by breadwinner | Hacker News Reader

So you're saying average people are fine for a big company? I would agree, if all you want to do is maintain existing products.

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I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have sufficient structure, process, guard rails, documentation, training and reviews. And big companies have a lot of this, specifically put in place to harvest above-average work from average talent. Yes, a company full of John Carmacks, un-shackled by process, can probably run circles around an average tech giant, but who can actually find and hire all these John Carmacks?

I think a company of Carmacks would probably be a mess; maybe resembling Xerox PARC, in that they came up with many interesting ideas, but rarely if ever actually created a profitable suite of products.

> I think you can actually do a lot with average people, if you have...

This is an important perception. Possibly due to general (and HN) bias towards talent and hero worship, this reality is overlooked at times. But at scale in a normal distribution, not all people will be within some stringent bounds of sigma. And companies once they become big will have some 'business to run'. Of course, on small scale I have seen a few skunkworks projects and have seen them work well.

A steady state calls for steady people.

The concept applies everywhere. The most skilled painter of art is probably not the best person to paint your living room.

its risky for big companies to move quickly. They mostly want to maintain what they have. its a myth that they want to innovate daily

Increase the conversion rates a couple percent, decrease the turnover a couple percent, and pretty soon your talking about big money.

Big companies 100% focus on maintaining their products/position, relying on acquisitions for innovation.

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