&gt; 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>I don&#x27;t think Facebook&#x27;s success depends on their optimized PHP runtime. I&#x27;d imagine most of the cost savings disappear when you factor in the engineers that are needed to build and maintain the system. I also don&#x27;t know the comparative effectiveness of hiring brilliant engineers versus brilliant salespeople versus just hiring average folk all round. Hey, maybe I&#x27;m wrong. But it certainly doesn&#x27;t feel like an absolutely obvious kind of thing, the kind of thing on which to base a theory of how to build and not build a tech company.