Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moneyball teams

bg-blog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 178 posts

Re: Moneyball teams

#151

Post by devonkim »

snarf21 wrote: post #113
ryandrake wrote: post #109

Another way to look at it is: What causes projects to succeed or fail? I've seen my share of failed projects throughout my career (as a participant and as a co-worker watching it happen). By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak, or because they didn't hire "rockstar" programmers, or because the engineers didn't go to Stanford. They failed because of things like…

I agree with everything you've said so I won't add to it. There is an interesting anecdote that I love. Some number of years ago there used to be a show called EcoChallenge. It was made by Marc Burnett but before Survivor. It was simply an adventure race but no politics and no contrived voting. Each team of 4 must be co-ed. There is a starting point, there is a stopping point and there are way stations along the way.…

A bit more on topic, I was asked to read a book on leadership and teamwork that's a bit of a cliche these days but Coach Wooden's Leadership Game Plan for Success covers a lot of these ideas specifically in a sports context. A lot of leadership texts revolve around sports out of sheer ubiquity in subject matter among business leaders culturally but beyond some pop sociology type of research I really don't pay much attention to them in a business setting. Why? In much of the world of software, day-to-day work is not a race against a competing team towards the exact same goal as much as it is a race against oneself and against market inertia whether that may be the default mode of failure or convergence to an equilibrium point that needs to be readjusted as the team discovers the hidden rules of a game.

In fact, a lot of business is probably a lot closer to something more sadistic and cruel in gross mechanics like from Takashi Miike's 2014 As the Gods Will (and the manga of the same) - arbitrary filters where the rules are very clear only until after people have died. Some stages test raw individual skills while others test cooperation. And in some cases it didn't actually matter if you had either of those because "luck" is the bigger factor (the fact few in practice agree upon these slack variables to achieving business success shows how random things are for survivorship moreso than controllable factors like skill and effort)

Re: Moneyball teams

#152

Post by georgeecollins »

BurningFrog wrote: post #40
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…

Imagine if you picked a sports team by the most paid players in their league. The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.

Sports is a terrible analogy for work. A sport is a game with rules that are created to create an entertaining event. The rules are defined. The outcomes are always instances that never build to a lasting change to the structures that created the outcome. Work is not like that in any way.

Re: Moneyball teams

#153

Post by mod »

marme wrote: post #70
SmellTheGlove wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a team of 6, sometimes the best individual 6 people are not the same group of 6 that you put out there to solve a problem. Let's continue to use hockey as an example, because I love ill-fitting sports analogies and I also love hockey. For sure, we already know we need 3 forwards, 2 defensemen and a goalie, so for the sake of argument, even if your 6th best skater is Wayne Gretzky, he's going to sit becaus…

Gretzky is great example because he was not the best player because he scored the most. He was the best because just him being on the ice lead to others scoring as well. Just being out there he was able to help the rest of the team score as well. Contrast this with a player like Kobe Bryant who was a great individual player but horrible team player. Kobe did not get along with his team mates and other than the points…

Kobe is top 30 all time assists. What are you talking about?

I detest the man, but you can't use statistics to argue against him.

http://stats.nba.com/featured/kobe_by_the_numbers_2015_11_29...

Re: Moneyball teams

#154

Post by pyoung »

mod wrote: post #153
marme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gretzky is great example because he was not the best player because he scored the most. He was the best because just him being on the ice lead to others scoring as well. Just being out there he was able to help the rest of the team score as well. Contrast this with a player like Kobe Bryant who was a great individual player but horrible team player. Kobe did not get along with his team mates and other than the points…

Kobe is top 30 all time assists. What are you talking about? I detest the man, but you can't use statistics to argue against him. http://stats.nba.com/featured/kobe_by_the_numbers_2015_11_29...

But he played ball for 20 years. I think average number of assists per game is a better stat here, where he was ranked 136th according to this link [1].

[1] http://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/ast_per_g_career...

Re: Moneyball teams

#155

Post by Terr_ »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #20
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…

That reminds me of a (proably apocryphal) story regarding IBM's "Black Team" [0]:

> The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.

> Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2472219

Re: Moneyball teams

#156

Post by hunglee2 »

Excellent start to a post but really needs a follow up. I'd love to hear OP's ideas on practical steps to take in order to effectively execute his team based hiring model.

Re: Moneyball teams

#157

Post by kamaal »

kmonsen wrote: post #100
rsync wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead, Billy Beane identified what components led to team success, then found which of those the market doesn't pay for. Then he got those guys." Let me ask you - as I am not a baseball nerd - if there is any counter-argument to the BillyBeane/Moneyball/WAR movement ? I don't mean knee-jerk, irrational objections - but real, reasoned counter-hypotheses ?

Yeah, the counter argument is that you mess up the team chemistry. This is extremely hard to define and measure so can sort of always be used. Billy Beane is constantly attacked for destroying the looker room chemistry in the local press.

>>you mess up the team chemistry.

True, only if you have a great team already and you don't desire messing it up. If that is the case, you wouldn't need that method at the first place.

On the other hand, teams are pretty dynamic these days given the interfaces and responsibilities are well defined. Or at least are largely defined well. So replacing team members is never really a problem.

Re: Moneyball teams

#158

Post by tomrod »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #20
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…

No worries. It was a reasonable deployment.

Re: Moneyball teams

#159

Post by kristianc »

sien wrote: post #145
BurningFrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you picked a sports team by the most paid players in their league. The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.

The soccer team would be Real Madrid. The baseball team the New York Yankees. They seem to do OK.

I can't speak for the New York Yankees, but the 'Galacticos' policy of Fiorentino Perez, where Real Madrid would try to sign one expensive, world-famous footballer every year, is widely considered to have been a failure despite initial success - partly because of a lack of interest in signing defensive players (they didn't want to pay Makelele's salary despite it being relatively low), locker room egos, and constant interference from the Club President over hiring.

To throw another example on the list, the New England Patriots are 30/33 for salary money spent. The Miami Dolphins are 5th. Spending big money for rockstars is neither necessary nor sufficient.

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/look-nflpa-salary-cap-char...

Re: Moneyball teams

#160

Post by bdg »

hardwire wrote: post #82

I hate these opinionated pieces about what works and what doesn't mainly BECAUSE they're not backed up by rigorous analysis (it's all a bunch of assumptions and untested conclusions) nor statistical proof. So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof. You can have an all-start team that kicks ass and you can have a bunch…

I'm glad that you read the entire post and it excited you enough to create an account and participate on HN.

I'm a big fan of having data. What data would you have liked? What collection method would have satisfied you?

Post reply on HN