It is a truism in Silicon Valley that star employees are worth ten to one hundred times as much as ordinary employees. This calculus is especially true for software engineers, but also applies to product managers, sales executives, and other key employees. If you are a star performer, the sky’s the limit in terms of what technology companies will be willing to attract or keep you.
We’ve seen this again and again. Facebook bought Friendfeed for $50 million just to get its highly talented engineers (co-founder Brett Taylor is now Facebook’s CTO). Last year, Google made a $3.5 million counteroffer to a staff engineer to keep him from going to Facebook. And this year, it paid two top product managers as much as $150 million to keep them from going to Twitter.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Stars Versus Great Teams
Author:Erick Schonfeld
