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Moneyball teams

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Re: Moneyball teams

#11

Post by georgeecollins »

I wish I could triple like this! Hire the best is lazy thinking.

* I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star".

* I have worked places where they only hire "superstars"-- and were pretty serious about paying for good talent and being picky-- and still failed for all kinds of organizational reasons. Teams with more role players, or more cohesion of goals would have performed better.

*I have seen people recommended because they worked at "X" or worked on the "X" project, and then turn out to be completely underwhelming. Great teams don't always only have great people, and sometimes the great team has people on it who are one promotion away being at their level of incompetence.

Re: Moneyball teams

#12

Post by dvt »

GavinMcG wrote: post #10
dvt wrote: post #8

Sooo I totally agree with this concept: that teamwork is more important than individual contribution; that we should focus on teams rather than metrics; and that teams are simply more resilient than other types of organizational structures. Buuut, then the author starts talking about some corporate-bs mumbo-jumbo "skills matrix". Moneyball is about "black swans" as Nassim Taleb would put it: unexpected outcomes that…

I wouldn't have said that Moneyball is all about intuition vs. evidence, with intuition trumping evidence. Rather the other way around: the A's acquired talent that the evidence suggested was underpriced, disrupting the traditional intuition-based scouting approach. It seems like you've got that backwards.

I really disagree, and I Podesta would also:

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201109/moneyb...

[2] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/23/the-l...

According to Podesta: "Subjectivity ruled the day in evaluating players ... We had a completely new set of metrics that bore no resemblance to anything you’d seen. We didn’t solve baseball. But we reduced the inefficiency of our decision making."

Re: Moneyball teams

#14

Post by Kenji »

If you say "the best" that also includes being good at teamwork. Great programmers write great interfaces anyway and are highly flexible.

Re: Moneyball teams

#15

Post by mediocrejoker »

neogodless wrote: post #6

I'm four paragraphs in, and I don't want to get too hung up on grammatical errors, but it's making it hard to follow along on what point they are trying to make. > and was won against with teams spending over $100 million What does that mean? They spent less on their teams, and they lost? So they should spend more! > Once upon a time the ambitions of your company were exceeding the throughput capacity of your develop…

I am a native English speaker and I had a hard time following the point as well. I surmised from the title that the thesis was going to be "x number of decent developers who work together well can produce a product better/faster/cheaper than x great developers who don't get along"

I think a bit of proof reading might make it easier to follow the argument in this article.

Re: Moneyball teams

#16

Post by shallot_router »

ktRolster wrote: post #3

Or, hire the best, and make a team out of them. Or hire people with high potential and push them to reach it. Or, hire people who can get the job done. One thing for sure: if you have mind-numbing processes, "the best" will leave, and others will not reach their potential.

Yeah, these "don't do [hip thing], do [contrarian but normal/common sense] thing" articles (or the reverse of them) are becoming a bit tired.

You should have good team-building and organizational skills and good technical hiring skills.

Re: Moneyball teams

#18

Post by jph »

Moneyball and Six Thinking Hats are excellent approaches to for people and roles.

But they aren't enough. The key driver of top-tier teams is excellent ongoing safe communication.

To build communications, use team goals (e.g. OKRs & KPIs), team ways of working (e.g. TEAM FOCUS), and team positions (e.g. scorecards).

My notes about these are open source: https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/

Edit to explain abbreviations:

* OKRs = Objectives & Key Results

* KPIs = Key Performance Indicators

* TEAM = Talk, Evaluate, Assist, Motivate

* FOCUS = Frame, Organize, Collect, Understand, Synthesize

Re: Moneyball teams

#20

Post by AceJohnny2 »

georgeecollins wrote: post #11

I wish I could triple like this! Hire the best is lazy thinking. * I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star". * I have worked places where they only hire "superstars"-- and were pretty serious about paying for good talent and being picky-- and still failed for all kinds of organizational reasons. Teams with more role players, or more cohesion…

At a former (large, organizationally deficient) company, there was this small team of 5 people with very different specialties (and personalities). They were a "strike team" of sorts, tasked with helping out at a technical level different projects that were in trouble. They were excellent. They saved my team's integration of a camera co-processor in an SoC.

But finally a re-org came around and some high-level manager didn't have a box under which to put them (or didn't have the right budget item to fit them in), and the team was dissolved.

The guys were good in the teams they each landed in, but the synergy[1] was dead.

Nowadays, my primary criteria for joining a team is the quality of the people and of the manager. I wish I could say I've seen other teams of the quality of that first one.

[1] yeah I said it

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