One of the guys who helped get Sun off the ground used to joke that there were about 150 people in the valley who actually created the companies, they would go somewhere, build a company then move on.
It does feel like that sometimes. It was more like that when you would get one big company every 3 - 5 years versus two or three in 2 or 3 years.
One key observation over the years is that the same person who sucks in one job can be a superstar in another job. The 'fit' is as much about responsibility, management, duties, and infrastructure as it is the individual. We hired an engineer at Sun once who came to us via HP and was highly decorated, he was a 'legend', but he could not get anything done at Sun without having his own admin (which is something Sun didn't do). I watched excellent engineers waste away at Google because they didn't have the political skills to avoid having their progress blocked, and watched as really poor engineers benefited out of proportion to the circumstance rather than skill.
