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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

#71

Post by coldtea »

mettamage wrote: post #33
fxtentacle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I incorporated a tiny company. 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.

I wonder if you ask them about this discrepancy and how they view it. Personally, I find it weird, but wonder how they'd justify the 1.5x expense.

Companies are full of weird cargo cult like that.

Having a ssalary cap on certain positions, but paying top dollar for external consultants doing the same is very very common.

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

#72

Post by ak_111 »

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…

You never saw it go differently but it must be in many organisation.

I can't imagine you can sustain the technical excellence over decades in places like Nvidia, Apple, Nintendo, ... without having a very robust process of protecting high-performance deeply technical people from wider organisational politics.

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

#73

Post by fifilura »

015a wrote: post #36
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…

One strong argument (maybe the only one) for the concept of controlling superstar players is the reality that they are going to leave, eventually; maybe for a better job, maybe retirement, maybe they get hit by a bus. If your output is entirely dependent on a superstar, it inevitably won't be durable against their departure; one way to look at corporations is through the lens of efficiency maximizers, but another equ…

> ... they are going to leave, eventually; maybe for a better job, maybe retirement, maybe they get hit by a bus.

I must say that I have heard that "hit by a bus" argument once too many.

What I see:

1 People very rarely get hit by a bus.

2 When someone leaves, two things happen.

A) Someone else, very often previously anonymous, becomes the new rock star.

B) It turns out that super important thing that guy was expert on was not so important after all...

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

#74

Post by jimnotgym »

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…

This all makes sense for knowledge workers, but what about the rest of the world?

In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office.

Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up.

This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?

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

#76

Post by huijzer »

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…

Customers want consistency. That’s why management turns people into a reliable system where anyone can quit without affecting the outcome of the system. Just like engineers think about software as a system, business people think about companies as a system. McDonalds is the prime example of this. If you enter one of the stores, it doesn’t matter whether John or Dave is in that day. The burger will be the same.

Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.

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

#77

Post by fxtentacle »

picklerish wrote: post #60
fxtentacle wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I incorporated a tiny company. 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.

@fxtentacle - I'm currently planning on starting a consulting company for my area of expertise (data engineering), can I reach out to you and learn the 101 of doing something like this?

I'd say just ask the questions because 1. I don't have all the answers and 2. if it's a group discussion we have a higher chance of learning something new

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

#78

Post by pkolaczk »

thesumofall wrote: post #26

Why would we see a 80/20 distribution when most human abilities are distributed on a bell curve? I don’t think we really have the tools to reliably measure performance, because performance can mean so many things in so many different contexts. And yes, this can include “process.” The referred McKinsey study talks about politics. Is success in democratic politics really defined by content or by your ability to build a…

Because we don’t know how to measure output properly and corporations often misattribute success. I’ve seen it happen a few times where someone delivering crap quickly is praised (oh, look how productive he is, so many tickets closed) or someone who has good autopromotion skills (does little but talks a lot about it) or someone who simply led the project, and not the guys who did the high quality work. Then there is often a group of people fixing stuff after a super star moves to another sexy project.

There is a saying „if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, you need a team”.

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

#79

Post by saagarjha »

scarface_74 wrote: post #66
yodsanklai wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently. In my "big tech company", there's a thorough (and I think overall fair) evaluation process, and a very high performer can earn a significant amount of money, e.g. 10x the salary of a junior. People are also strongly incentized to deliver through bonuses and stock refresher. I'm not denying that what you describe exists in some (most?) companies, but ther…

A junior at BigTech averages around $170K. Are you really saying a high performer can make $1.7 million in compensation a year? I’m sure there are a very few that do.

Sure, but there are very few high performers.

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

#80

Post by saagarjha »

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…

Interestingly, every time I see this argument brought up the people who do so seem to count themselves as part of either the average or superstar bucket ;)
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