&gt; With larger companies, they will never say it,<p>They will say it. I worked for a startup acquired by Yahoo. I was hired by the founders, but then they all left and I was kind of stranded. Anyway I tried to make a go of it, and proposed how we were going to hire some new great people, and my manager expressed confusion about why I wanted great people.<p>In his view, if you get great people to do not-so-great jobs, you&#x27;ll end up overpaying and then they will just leave. For him it was obvious that not all jobs are going to be great. Most of them will kind of suck.<p>It was 180° away from how I thought, which is the standard &quot;only hire A players&quot; script. But then I realized it did make a kind of sense. Startups and small companies that win have geniuses doing everything, including very unglamorous work. Often they have great solutions which work okay for them, but are incomprehensible to others. (Example: Paul Graham&#x27;s Yahoo Store builder in Lisp).<p>Such people are compensated with maybe stock options, but more importantly, with freedom. That wasn&#x27;t really on offer at a big company. So we had to look for average people to do average things at an average rate, and usually it would be multiple people to do the job that one brilliant person would have taken on.