Comment by nomilk
3 years ago
Sam Altman said something to the effect of 'OpenAI has the highest talent density of any company'.
OpenAI is modest in employee count and extreme in employee talent, with its employees rewarded commensurately.
3 years ago
Sam Altman said something to the effect of 'OpenAI has the highest talent density of any company'.
OpenAI is modest in employee count and extreme in employee talent, with its employees rewarded commensurately.
Talent is not universal though. A great product/team/workplace can turn unmotivated middling knowledge people into heroes. Not only is massively more worth to raise talent in-house, heterogenous teams are way more healthy. Early Googlers wrote litanies on this.
They can pay it, it sounds good for investors/general public, but if you take away the brand/hype fapping on "we only have the best" would sounds like a red flag to an experienced engineer.
Can we define talent. Also context matters. Some companies have lower "talent density" because their size requires some level of operational headcount.
I know more than half a dozen extremely top of their field for sure engineers who work there. Even having them would be an insane concentration of talent imo.
Maybe for its size but I bet there are lots of smaller companies with higher talent density, e.g. Oxide Computer.