[_m8fo]

"B and lower grades"... what? If you have some magical process to separate the "B and lower" from the supposed A, do tell. Even if you had such a process money would be the mechanism to capture and retain the best people, so yeah, money is still the solution to this problem.

[PeterisP]

That's kind of the problem - no one has a magical process to quickly/easily separate good engineers from the mediocre ones, you can only filter out obvious incompetence.

So simply offering lots of money is not sufficient to hire good engineers, you'll still get a mix of good and poor ones, and will need to figure out to filter them afterwards when you've had sufficient time to see what they're made of.

[_m8fo]

You're right that there's no process to quickly and easily separate them, however for enough money people will endure a long and difficult process, which is the point.