These topics are orthogonal. You can hire the best and build teams at the same time.
I agree with that. I attempted to describe a way for a company to improve throughput that isn't simply "hire the best".
Moneyball teams
161–170 of 178 posts
Re: Moneyball teams
#162Seth Godin actually talks about this in his book the dip where he mentions that the best means the best in their world (he goes on to explain the concept of their world). Highly recommend the read.
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll add it to my reading list!
Re: Moneyball teams
#163Sooo 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…
> But that goes completely against the "skills matrix" concept. The whole point of Moneyball is that the Oakland players were flawed given standard metrics
If anything I think I'm advocating against using "standard metrics", and opting to create ones that are meaningful to what it takes to ship software in your company. Where standard metrics are the ones that result in hiring the traditionally "best" developers.
> corporate-bs mumbo-jumbo
Mumbo? Perhaps. Jumbo? Perhaps not!
Re: Moneyball teams
#164Earlier 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.
Goalies are the highest paid players in hockey? Interesting.
A hot goalie is more important than a hot forward in the NHL playoffs...
Re: Moneyball teams
#165One thing that struck me from Ed Catmull's book on Pixar, Creativity Inc[1] was how much effort they put into trying to get people to work together effectively and how important that was in the final results, versus the talents of the "super stars".
After the Disney acquisition, they kept the companies separate, but basically got rid of a bunch of red tape at Disney Animation and injected a bunch of Pixar cultural practices. The DA team went from mediocre results (many people thought Pixar would just shut them down) to producing hit movies.
Re: Moneyball teams
#166I'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…
Thanks for spotting those problems. I've updated the post. I've debated hiring a proof reader and may do that now as I passed this around my circle of friends before publishing.
Re: Moneyball teams
#167I'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.
I had hoped to convince people that since hiring is about improving team throughput there may be better ways to do that besides simply saying "hire the best".
Re: Moneyball teams
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. You can take a look at the Rangers right now, whose only true "superstar" is the goalie- Lundqvist.
OK, but that's my claim. My claim is that you'd still rather have Crosby, because there's a much bigger talent gap between him and his hypothetical league-average replacement at center than between Lundqvist and a league-average goalie.
Obviously I meant to say that's not my claim :)
Re: Moneyball teams
#169This is a pretty important lesson that gets lost at times. Teams with people of diversified passions work well; if everybody is super into data structures, UX, security, etc., then debates can rage and feelings can get hurt. When people on a team specialize differently, everybody can be a mentor to everybody else. To me, that is a great team to be on.
Yes, and I also suspect this has lead to "we don't hire jerks" policies, which are great when you find someone who enters a conversation and talks down to everyone. That person fails a culture fit.
However, there's another kind of person who just talks over you, doesn't put in the effort to communicate their ideas, or refuses to accept other ideas. These can remain hidden until tested in the depths of some technical discussion. They might pass a culture fit.
Re: Moneyball teams
#170Moneyball 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 abbreviat…
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Totally, just imagine how people who don't know anything about tech feel when they don't grok our jargon!.