| They don't, but... Google has brand recognition, and an enormous recruiting pipeline so they can hire one in 50 or 100 candidates. They are better able to select for great candidates because they have more data and much more sophisticated system for identifying talent. They pay very high salaries so they can retain top talent. The average candidate that applies to Google is going to be a better than the average candidate that applies to a small/medium shop. A small medium shop that tried this would be chronically and severely understaffed with a high turn over and would probably still fail at finding the best candidates. If you are a small or medium sized shop and really need top level talent the best thing to do is probably just hire googlers and netflixers and pay them a market rate of 400-500k a year. But for most products it's not worth it because the end product wouldn't be materially different enough from an average developer building it to justify the cost. Also most small to medium shops could improve engineering quality by taking the Netflix approach which is getting better at firing people, and compensate them for the lack of job security with cash. |