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by robocat 1311 days ago
> Top dev talent is overrated

The problem is that talent is defined by hindsight: “When the company was acquired by Facebook, it had 35 engineers” https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to work on a successful product due to a successful market, we call them talented. If A flamed out due to unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A.

But technical talent is definitely not overrated - because there are too many examples where talented teams have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.