[opportune]

If you want to be as profitable as Google or Facebook, you probably do need some rockstars, but you also need to be developing a technology or business that produces tremendous amounts of value. You can’t just hire rockstars to work on something low margin or without significant demand and expect because they’re amazing engineers that you’ll make a lot of money. Conversely Airbnb has made a lot of money and is just CRUD - they pay a lot and I’m sure there’s some fancy stuff behind the scenes, but you could probably copy most of the user visible functionality with a team of bootcamp devs.

I feel like the tail is wagging the dog a bit here because if what you’re actually trying to optimize for is building >$100b business, hiring rockstars or creating a rockstar culture is just one aspect of getting there which you may not even need.

[srpablo]

> If you want to be as profitable as Google or Facebook, you probably do need some rockstars, but you also need to be developing a technology or business that produces tremendous amounts of value.

Definitely agree on this.

> You can’t just hire rockstars to work on something low margin or without significant demand and expect because they’re amazing engineers that you’ll make a lot of money.

This isn't what I'm trying to argue though — I think when you reach for the ceiling instead of avoid a floor, you're more likely to find those tremendous business value opportunities. Consider what Google shipped/built under Schmidt, "20% time," "Don't be evil," and "we're a different kind of company" vs… the last 10 years?

I'm not saying "being wild and creative makes a bad business good," I'm saying "embracing some narratives of a creative industry may increase output and be more cost-effective, even if playing "outside the playbook of the 0% era" is scary."

---

On another note, I'm regretting that "rockstars" is in the title . It was meant to support the idea that tech was more of a "creatives" industry (and the organic use of that to mean "great talent" is a symptom of that); but I think my "break playbook and embrace creativity" is being read as "let's go back to rockstars/ninjas! Genius hackers who don't sleep and don't care about HR!!!!" which is… not how I feel haha.

[opportune]

That’s fair, I think I strawmanned you a bit - I know you’re not arguing that taking a creative approach to software will automatically add value.

To your point about Google, that approach did lead to gmail, but also many abandoned projects like Buzz and Reader that led to Google’s infamous reputation for canceling products.

My original point remains: I think the business requirements and goals should inform the culture and hiring processes of a company. If you don’t need to deviate from the playbook to get things done, why should you? And not every developer wants to deviate from the playbook either, some prefer stable predictable work - while I’m not personally in that camp I think it’s not a moral failing, doing unpredictable things is more stressful as more things can go wrong, you might have to work more or suffer the consequences of delays/starting over, etc.

If you’re a bank, or a web consultancy, you want boring and predictable solutions. Conversely if you’re OpenAi you want people willing to reason from first principles and invent crazy new things because you’re shipping cutting edge technology at massive scale - and I think they’re doing that. So I guess I’m left wondering where exactly you think opportunities are being left on the table due to overly rote software development practices that would be improved by creativity?

[patja]

The term "creative" has always bothered me as it seems to usually be applied to roles that don't actually create anything other than pretty pictures/designs/words. I guess it makes sense from the aspect of "creativity" but it seems like those who glom onto the appellation of "creative" almost always rely on someone else to do the heavy lifting of building (the actual creation of a product) and bringing anything to market.

[namaria]

I think you're conflating 'creation' as in coming up with something new, with 'production' as in making stuff/providing services...