> “The difference between, say, the worst taxicab driver and the best taxicab driver to get you across town in Manhattan might be 2-to-1. The best one will get you there in 15 minutes, the worst one will get you there in half an hour… But in the field that I’m in… the difference between a good software person and a great software person is probably 50-to-1 or 25-to-1. Huge dynamic range. Therefore I’ve found, not just in software but in almost everything I’ve done, it really pays to go after the best people in the world.” > > — Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple People underestimate how much variation there is in ability, but in fields that require deep creativity, the difference between good and great is enormous. The best engineers don’t just write cleaner code or work faster. They think in entirely different ways, solving problems others often don’t even see. This is why hiring matters so much. A company full of average engineers won’t just be slower; they’ll build the wrong things. The best people aren’t just more productive, they shift the trajectory of what’s possible. Steve Jobs understood this instinctively, and it’s the reason why small teams of exceptional people routinely outperform large teams of merely good ones.