[closeparen]

Where I’ve seen teams with high concentrations of unusually smart people, they gelled and collaborated at least as well as anyone else. In fact the bandwidth and fidelity of their idea transfers is part of what made them impressive. It’s like they had their own little language to describe the codebase and what to do with it.

These were mature and soft-spoken people; might be different with brash young hotshots.

[t0astbread]

To me that sounds like an environment where there's not a lot of competition involved. (Which is what I was describing.)

[closeparen]

They were far and away the most selective team in the company.

I’ve seen this before in university too; competitive to get into can still be cooperative once in.

[t0astbread]

HN thread limit might cut this off but what if someone in that team starts experiencing problems and self-doubt? If everything in the team has always worked smoothly before they might not be able to handle it.

Additionally, elitist teams might scare off some people that could otherwise be great engineers if they just got a little entry help. Sure they can "get that elsewhere" but if every team behaved like that there's not only nowhere to enter, but there's also sort of an omnipresent assumption that you have to be good from the start in order to be able to achieve something in engineering.

I'm not saying your described team doesn't work but it's not exactly the kind of culture HR should be striving for in my opinion. (Albeit it's still far better than than a team that doesn't work at all or works against each other.)