21–30 of 287 posts
Absent reliable way to surround ourselves with superstars we rely on process to lift the average for everyone.
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.
Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what he thought was mediocre talent.
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…
Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 He used outdated tech, didn't understand many modern dev techniques.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 v…
That’s who I imagined.
Just thinking out loud, not trying to be smarty pants, but on the other hand people that pontificate every musing from Steve Jobs feel a bit… uneducated to me. Publications such as inc feel geared towards people that consider themselves to understand technology because they are Apple power users. Bit like claiming to be specialist in slaughterhouses just because you eat 3 burgers per day.
I’m not downplaying the relevance of content, but I’m simply arguing that performance is much more nuanced and diverse than just being good at content
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…
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…
"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.
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.
We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is testing?, what documentation?, everything is in a few people's heads, and so on.
Having said that, I'm working on a new feature with another programmer and asking questions about this new feature we're working on together. Some of the ideas behind it just don't jive, I don't believe this thing will do what the customer needs (possibly not at all)... and certainly not in the best possible way. Now we're on the same page about a few things, mostly that we don't have enough information, but the response is different.
The other programmer thinks that we just need a better and more detailed user story as per the processes we're trying to put in place. To them that's the start and end of it. However, even that won't be good enough to me. A "better" user story built out of the ideas we have so far is just as flawed, there are already issues with what we've been told. At worst this will end up re-written because it does nothing the customer needs, or it does it in a really awkward and wonky way.
The other programmers response is "well that's the fault of the person who wrote that user story" and they would seem to just rather we write it as requested and roll on.
Not entirely wrong as far as just the business process goes ... but I'd rather actually solve the problem, and talk to the customer, get the details, talk it out with all involved so we can construct something more flexible, re-usable, and ... works.
But there is that process, that "it's this group's responsibility, not ours" that is such an easy out, entirely how things could work "correctly", and also in this case a plan for failure.
Steve said the folks who care about the content are a pain in the butt to work with, and I've got a few dozen questions I need to hammer some folks with about this new feature... they're not going to like it (they thought they were done with this when they made the request), but the questions need to be asked to do it right.
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