Sounds very similar to what Linus Torvalds once said:
"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
121–130 of 287 posts
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
we fought a whole war over this you know
I'm pretty sure Dr Price isn't the one who have been coming up with these stupid "laws" all along; it's the Americans.
Who makes them is irrelevant. So, Why do you hate the laws themselves? If you only hate the laws because of who created them then there is no reason to keep talking.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 g…
Superstars are why I don’t try harder and am less engaged. They take all of the interesting ownership and inject themselves into every process and space for communication. I wait for these people to burn out and want to actually be a team member instead of a productivity bully hoarding opportunity for themselves. They want to be the first on everything so they can influence it to be more how they like, the rest of te…
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Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I think the idea that almost everything is a “group project” in life and that the things learned from school group projects carry over beyond to the rest of life holds true. It’s a simplification but has more than an ounce of truth.
Definitely! I had several university group projects where several of the team members did little-to-nothing. If you want to succeed you gotta drag people along. It's actually better if they're honest about it, telling you they're not going to be able to do the work either on time or to the expected standards. Instead, I find people pretend things are "going well", then produce crap other people, superstars or not, have to fix anyway. The top 20% is supporting the bottom 80%.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#125Corporations, 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.
Most people see this, and yet the reaction of many is to be deeply, passionately outraged that two people could ever be recognized or compensated differently.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#126Corporations, 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.
So called flat hierarchies also mean that the ones that have the real power can never be truly challenged. It is like climbing the hill and then cutting the rope to ensure nobody else can do it.
I've seem this a lot in companies adopting agile. That was always a cabal that had all the real power and the benefits than come with it, but suddenly because of "self-organizing", "flat hierarchy", there was no more any more or less formal path for ascending in the organization.
During the first years of the scrum frenzy, the figure of the tech lead almost disappeared in a lot of companies.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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, iP…
Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
I'm not sure.
The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak).
But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it.
To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.
And yet isn’t Pixar famous for their intensive, structured process for movie development?
Yeah, from what I've read Pixar's success seems to have had more to do with "management" getting completely out of the way.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I admit I was sometimes carried. In creative work this is bound to happen. All people firing on all cylinders and coordinating well is a rarity in creative work. It might work in a kitchen or sailing boat though.
There's several types of "carrying". You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff. This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them. The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardles…
I know several who are in the second category. The problem with constantly fixing other's mistakes is the other people never learn to take responsibility. They know the people carrying the project are not going to let it fail. No matter what, whatever they did is going to get fixed.
Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Superstars are why I don’t try harder and am less engaged. They take all of the interesting ownership and inject themselves into every process and space for communication. I wait for these people to burn out and want to actually be a team member instead of a productivity bully hoarding opportunity for themselves. They want to be the first on everything so they can influence it to be more how they like, the rest of te…
What happens when rest of the team does not rise to the occasion? You now have a happy but very mediocre team for the task on hand. Decision making is very democratic but seldom happens in time. I feel you need pace setters but not excessively reward individual heroics.
A very mediocre team that does not rise to the occasion (aka fails at delivering) probably will look bad for management and will be sidesteps (aka outsourced) if not fully replaced.