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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

#11

Post by sangnoir »

colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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.

> Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies

You should read his email to Eric Schmidt, he outlined his bold, bout-of-the-box ideas on keeping great talent.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#12

Post by 1over137 »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #3

Corporations, 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…

>That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.

Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#13

Post by fredski42 »

sangnoir wrote: post #11
colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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.

> Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies You should read his email to Eric Schmidt, he outlined his bold, bout-of-the-box ideas on keeping great talent.

Do you have a link?

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#14

Post by robocat »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #8
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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…

> It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers.

Who labelled them? The self-labelled are often crappy.

The last superstar I worked with seemed like a Cro-Magnon developer. He used outdated tech, didn't understand many modern dev techniques. However he was extremely productive (he was very very good at concentrating on necessary outcomes and ignoring make work). His value was _far_ more than 10x the average developer. He certainly didn't seem to be valuable. Despite his serious faults he produced gold. He was wildly undervalued by other developers.

Keep your eyes open - some superstars are invisible. This especially holds in other soft areas like marketing.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#15

Post by neilv »

> 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. Since pay was tied to evaluation ratings, they didn't get the raises they deserved. Or the opportunities.

If you're ever in this management situation, you can try working the problem up the chain. (At least your own immediate manager, or possibly up and sideways, if you're empowered to do that.)

One of the times I did something like that, for a peer who was undervalued, and who'd confided how upset they were at the runaround they were getting. The person who could fix the situation was an exec 2-3 levels up. Since I was allowed to interface throughout the company on some things, I went and explained the situation to the exec, and something about the impact of this person. The exec agreed, and quickly unblocked HR and management to fix it.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#16

Post by glitchc »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #3

Corporations, 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…

Actually, that's how the world works most of the time. Superstars also know it and are used to it from early childhood. They are expected to carry the load and equally importantly, the team is expected to listen to them. It works like this in all walks of life, because simply put, human beings are not equal in ability.

Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves.

Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#17

Post by walteweiss »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #3

Corporations, 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…

Have you ever tried freelancing or having your own company? I never worked in corporations and honestly cannot see myself ever there, considering the money I’d been making freelancing will never be paid to me by any company in the world if they’d just hire me.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#18

Post by kragen »

smackeyacky wrote: post #6
colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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

i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully. astoundingly successfully actually

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#19

Post by signatoremo »

smackeyacky wrote: post #6
colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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

> but he got very, very lucky first.

Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes.

Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#20

Post by mediumsmart »

fredski42 wrote: post #13
sangnoir wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies You should read his email to Eric Schmidt, he outlined his bold, bout-of-the-box ideas on keeping great talent.

Do you have a link?

Maybe it is this email exchange:

https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543

second result on Kagi using “steve jobs email to eric schmidt”

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