Why does he holds up an engineering team of <i>250</i> engineers, all to maintain Etsy, as proving out his hypothesis?<p>That&#x27;s larger, by far, than engineering teams producing much larger, much more complex, much more involved pieces of software at Google, Apple, and Microsoft.<p>This &quot;success story&quot; is the kind of circular self-affirmation that can only emerge when you&#x27;ve been given a blank check, and nobody involved cares whether you&#x27;ve spent it wisely. It does nothing to support his belief in the efficacy of his &quot;heretical&quot; ideals, of which I find this one especially disconcerting:<p><i>&quot;You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying.&quot;</i><p>Imagine if Facebook adopted this strategy, and thus, never hired the extremely smart engineers responsible for things like Hack, or their optimized PHP runtime.<p>How would they ever escape the costly orbit of PHP? How much more would they be spending on server resources, and how many more engineers would they have to hire to keep things running as they grew?