61–70 of 396 posts
- not take into account the maintenance // evolving stuff part. The more legacy and problem you have, the more your ignore the issue.
- judging performance based on spurious criteria or worse affect
- micro management
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
How do you propose filtering the candidates? The only way to know for sure how they perform is to actually hire them and see how they perform after some amount of time. Since you will be firing a majority of people this causes a culture of fear. Interviews are far too unreliable for filtering candidates like you are proposing.
There are some very common ones; * Building a one more generation of product than the market supports (so you build a new version when the market has moved on to something new). * Rewarding productivity over quality. * Managing to a second order effect. For example when Nestle' bought Dryers they managed to 'most profit per gallon' which rewarded people who substituted inferior (and cheaper) components, that lead to…
What if said employee pulls in 10x, 100x more revenue/value than average worker for the company? Would you fire him because the rule book say so? That said I trust in effective communication as soon as possible to manage difficult situations or misbehaviour. Often the reasons can be deeply personal or family related and people are preoccupied with stuff outside work. We are human and human relations are variable, not absolute.
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
On top of that, your unicorns are only really worth their wages if they are solving problems no one else can or if they are mentoring others.
There are some very common ones; * Building a one more generation of product than the market supports (so you build a new version when the market has moved on to something new). * Rewarding productivity over quality. * Managing to a second order effect. For example when Nestle' bought Dryers they managed to 'most profit per gallon' which rewarded people who substituted inferior (and cheaper) components, that lead to…
On the Nestle example: One of the biggest constraints in a business is employee focus. Theoretically, you want to maximize future free cash flow. Unfortunately, there are many inputs: rev growth, solid roi on capex, lowering non-essential costs, employee retention, unit costs, brand etc. Management teams have to distill the message about what they want in a way that many employees can get behind. Nestle was too focus…
Customers, employees, shareholders.
* Management (Manager) hardly aligns their goals with the client/partner (X) for whom we support instead they're primarily interested in filling up their Kpis in their ppt for their own organisation (XSF) even when we're fully funded by X.
* New Projects and tasks are kicked off just to make more number of slides in the weekly meeting rather than delivering valuable insight on time that could just go on in an email.
* Employees are just another data point in their Kpi sheet, empathy for wasting employees time and career doesn't seem to exist.
* Fresh grads out of college has been taken into the organisation with no clear idea about how to help them with a successful career and nor this responsibility exists.
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
I think we need to put the myth of the 10x developer to bed. 99% of the time, the 10x guy is just someone who solved the same or similar problem at his or her last job and are simply exercising their experience. Sure there are outliers, but that's the same in every field - whereas in programming 50% of people believe that they're the 10x guy and that all their cow-orkers are slothful idiots.
* Spending too much on marketing/sales before people want the product. They usually just end up burning their brand if the product is too low quality.
* Too much focus on building multiple small features rather than focusing on the value proposition.
* Trying to negotiate deadlines for product development. "We don't have two months to finish this. Let's do this in one." In software estimation, there's the estimate, the target, and the commitment. If the commitment and estimate are far off, it should be questioned why, not negotiated.
* Hiring two mediocre developers at half the salary of one good developer. They usually can't solve problems past a certain treshhold.
* Importing tech talent, rather than promoting. Usually the people who have built the product have a better understanding of the tech stack than someone else they import.
* Startups that rely on low quality people to skimp on the budget. These people later form the DNA of the company and make it difficult to improve, if they're not the type who improve themselves.
I've never met a manager that wouldn't rather pay four average people $100/hr to solve a problem that one smart person could solve in half the time for $400/hr. There seems to be some sort of quasi-religious belief in the fundamental averageness of humans; consequently the difference between developer salaries at any company varies by maybe 50%, whereas the productivity varies by at least a full order of magnitude. U…
- they didn't work well with others and soaked up a lot of management time dealing with their shit.
- they had really limited areas of expertise where they were amazing, but couldn't fill in for a sick colleague.
- they worked in 2-3 day sprints for ridiculous hours, and then stayed home or might as well have.
I'm sure there are incredible people out there who can 10x and also be great team members, and I'm sure management are idiots if they don't pay them 10x.
But in my experience, the people who claim to be 10x are usually just insufferable egotists who have no idea of the pain they cause for everyone else.