> But I have to wonder: if "any asshole" can build orgs like that, why don't they?
Other posters have said money, but it’s also a function of time—how long can a company afford to wait to find the perfect “unicorn” engineer who excels in every aspect of the product but may take a long time to hire, versus hiring someone whose expertise only covers some of the product’s needs but can be found immediately?
Certain companies benefit disproportionately from unicorns, especially those in interdisciplinary fields. For instance, in quantitative finance, a single individual who’s an excellent 1. systems programmer, 2. mathematician, and 3. financial market expert will contribute a lot more than a team of three specialists in each of those domains. But it’s a lot faster to hire that team of three versus finding the rare individual who can supplant a whole team. This is also true in less exotic fields—it’s rare to find someone who’s truly a “full stack” web developer, with a deep understanding of networking protocols and Linux system administration and (cloud based) distributed systems and databases and caching services and frontend development & cetera. But the company that can afford the money and time to find these people will make a much better product than the company that cannot.
(Whether the product actually needs the quality commensurate with all that engineering firepower is an entirely other question.)
Other posters have said money, but it’s also a function of time—how long can a company afford to wait to find the perfect “unicorn” engineer who excels in every aspect of the product but may take a long time to hire, versus hiring someone whose expertise only covers some of the product’s needs but can be found immediately?
Certain companies benefit disproportionately from unicorns, especially those in interdisciplinary fields. For instance, in quantitative finance, a single individual who’s an excellent 1. systems programmer, 2. mathematician, and 3. financial market expert will contribute a lot more than a team of three specialists in each of those domains. But it’s a lot faster to hire that team of three versus finding the rare individual who can supplant a whole team. This is also true in less exotic fields—it’s rare to find someone who’s truly a “full stack” web developer, with a deep understanding of networking protocols and Linux system administration and (cloud based) distributed systems and databases and caching services and frontend development & cetera. But the company that can afford the money and time to find these people will make a much better product than the company that cannot.
(Whether the product actually needs the quality commensurate with all that engineering firepower is an entirely other question.)