In my experience, Google employees individually are not much smarter or more productive than what you'd find in a top-tier computer science department or successful startup.  Google's engineering reputation comes from having 20,000 of them, all with access to the same code &#38; information, similar cultural values, and mostly aligned goals.<p>It's a critical mass problem.  One smart person is a useful open-source library.  Ten smart people is a successful startup.  Twenty thousand smart people is Google.<p>There're certain efficiencies of scale that you can get with twenty thousand employees that are all empowered to work together.  You get more specialization, so your UI designer is <i>really</i> good, and your UI engineer is <i>really</i> good, and your toolsmith is <i>really</i> good, and your backend algorithms person is <i>really</i> good, and the whole product benefits from that.  You get the cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when smart people get together over food in a relaxed atmosphere.  And you get the accumulated infrastructure built from having ten years of really smart people working on hard problems.<p>The network organization tends to eliminate the biggest problem that other tech companies have: scale.  Typically, you eventually get a dumb middle manager placed on top of a bunch of smart programmers, and the whole group drops to the level of the weakest link.  By empowering people to reach out across the organization to whoever's the best person for the task, regardless of the org chart, you can route around weak links.  The organization starts being defined by its best performers instead of its worst performers.