[georgemcbay]

Brilliant is a very bold word -- I've met a number of people who work (or who have previously worked) at Google and Facebook that are a long way from brilliant.

But the point is valid in that we have an industry where every company likes to posture and interview as if they are hiring the top 1% of programmers only to turn around and give them jobs that a well-trained monkey could almost do.

[hkmurakami]

Well, in this industry at least, every great engineer you do manage to hire is one fewer great engineer that your competitor can't hire. In an environment of talent scarcity, resource hoarding actually seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy.