27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
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Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#2Ostensibly (2006)
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#3Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve.
The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist.
This was my experience in (large co).
I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC.
Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output.
Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star.
Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.”
Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there.
A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity.
The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.”
You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star.
That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#4Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 pe…
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Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#5Jobs talks about this in https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE. I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who do, understand and care are more valuable than those who only focus on process and politics.
Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#6Jobs talks about this in https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE . I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who do, understand and care are more valuable than those who only focus on process and politics. Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.
Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first.
We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#7Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 pe…
Another reason why today's corporations love teams and flat hierarchies is because they turn "responsibility" into a post-modern concept that fluidly adapts to mean everything or nothing. One day the boss is the boss, the next day nobody is accountable for anything, and decisions are really just the magical synergy of team dynamics.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#8Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 pe…
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If you count negative value developers I can totally believe in a 10x one. It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers.
Realistically, they would be very uncommon, and odds are that your small company has 0 of them. Of the developers I know that are actual superstars when compared to average developers, they have zero problem displaying their value and make upwards of 7 figures. All of them are aged 40+ too.
So, yeah, I don't have a problem with the concept. I just think it gets misapplied.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#9> For example, I once rated all my employees as “superior,” and for good reason: They were the most productive team in the plant.
> HR kicked my evaluations back and said I needed to distribute my evaluations more “fairly.”
> “Fairly,” of course, meant “bell curve.”
> That caused a few outstanding employees to be undervalued and, as a result, under-rewarded.
So instead of bell curve, they should be using power law distribution.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#10Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 pe…
"Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star."
This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.