"Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" is of course dumb in the grand scheme of things, but the fusion reactor of progress really is in the youth.
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
#82Earlier 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.
If you don’t mind me asking, what specific area do you specialize in with your consulting work? I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.
I do any kind of research and software development. But the most profitable tasks tend to be finding a new angle for how you can automate something.
In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment.
Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#83> 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 rai…
> you can try working the problem up the chain
Not just can, but must. That's the whole point of the team having a manager, to have someone defend them up there. When shit starts raining from above, you don't garnish it with platitudes to "weaken the impact" and pass it to your subordinates, you do your damn best to fight it.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#84Corporations, 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…
This hero worshippong always puzzles me. All real world examples, from certified sport super stars to actual rock stars, show us that the proverbial employee rockstar is a myth.
No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them.
A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon.
Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I show up differently in their accounting ledger, and because investors scrutinise that, management will optimise for it. Instead of employee cost (which is usually tightly controlled) I now show up as an external service next to extortionate cloud bills (where nobody knows or cares what they pay for anyway) somewhere 2 levels deep in COGS. Being the cheapest service provider looks a lot better on paper than being th…
Also depending on country there is tax and social security payments which companies dont have pay when they are buying consulting.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#86Jobs 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.
Process is required to get mediocre talent to churn out reasonable content, which is Steve's references to HP/IBM/etc. 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…
And even elite talent needs to be professional enough to
- accept the need guidance
- follow some standards and rules to make work reproduceable and understabdable by others
- be able to work in teams
People tend to ignore the finer points in whatever Steve Jobs said, especially after his return to Apple.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#87> In fact, I remember folks screaming at me that it would take five years to engineer a mouse, and it would cost $300 to build. I finally got fed up and went outside and found David Kelly Design... and in 90 days we had a mouse we could build for $15 that was phenomenally reliable.
That was a fib. I recall that first Mac mouse had two little (maybe 3mm diameter?) tabs underneath to support it, and they quickly wore away resulting in the mouse largely being unusable without gluing something to the bottom to stabilize it.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#88Why 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…
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Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I show up differently in their accounting ledger, and because investors scrutinise that, management will optimise for it. Instead of employee cost (which is usually tightly controlled) I now show up as an external service next to extortionate cloud bills (where nobody knows or cares what they pay for anyway) somewhere 2 levels deep in COGS. Being the cheapest service provider looks a lot better on paper than being th…
Also depending on country there is tax and social security payments which companies dont have pay when they are buying consulting.
And in Europe consultants are much, much easier to fire (especially if the minimum standard of performance is "more capable than our existing staff" or the problem is for an indeterminate amount of time)
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#90Corporations, 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'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.
So in essence you apply for regular employment and when you get turned down you pitch your consulting service?
On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well, but with kid on the way I am worried I won't be able to find clients...