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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

#131

Post by elzbardico »

signatoremo wrote: post #19
smackeyacky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, iP…

Being fired at that time was the best thing that could happen both to Apple and Jobs.

If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.

The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".

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

#132

Post by asveikau »

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 seems like something between a conspiracy theory and your own ego going unchecked.

I observed something like this, or at least I thought I did. With many more years of reflection, and there were hints along the way as it happened in realtime, I came to realize that the contribution of those I had written off as non-performers and dead weight was actually higher than I had estimated and difficult to actually quantify. My hope for you is that you one day reach similar epiphanies. Because your attitude that some are much better than others and need to be compensated out of proportion is quite toxic. Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.

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

#133

Post by ido »

fxtentacle wrote: post #82
m_a_g wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wish you a ton of success, we need a lot of streamlining and digitalisation here! I hope you’ll do some good work for the government next as there’s so much red tape and antiquated methods.

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

#134

Post by mlrtime »

fifilura wrote: post #73
015a wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I use 'hit by a bus' sometimes, it's just a metaphor for leaves abruptly without much notice.

You never know the type of employee and their motives for leaving until they do. Some are excellent and spend two weeks documenting and knowledge sharing. Some take a two week vacation. This point is orthogonal to superstar.

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

#135

Post by speeder »

pintxo wrote: post #105
magicalhippo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess it's different over in the states, but my boss said the cost to the company is roughly 2x the salary. This includes taxes (not income tax), pension and such. So 1.5x would be a steal in comparison.

2x sounds like it includes non-billable employees like assistants, HR, accounting etc. A 100% overhead is probably quite common. Pure employee costs are more in the 1.2 - 1.3x range (Europe). That is 30% on top of the gross salary for employer taxes, health insurances etc.

I am in Portugal. Here your real wages are tiny compared to the company expenses.

To start: everyone pays 34.75% of mandatory social contribution, even if you are on minimum wage. Government tricks people saying the contribution is "only" 11% but charges the other 23.75% from the employer.

So if a company pays 1000 eur to "you" (remember a chunk goes straight to government and skips you, but they are still spending that to pay you) you get 652.5 euro. Or 65% roughly. And that is only the social contribution part.

The average income tax for a tech worker is around 20%. Thus you get instead 500 euro flat.

Thus a Portuguese company to hire a tech worker would literally spend the double of your taxless wages just to hire you and pay the income taxes and social contribution. Then if you factor all other potential expenses things get even sillier.

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

#136

Post by jbverschoor »

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…

Amen. very true..

"Processes" are for factories. Diluting is good for factories, cogs.

For some type of 'creationary' work, it's also fine.

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

#137

Post by kbos87 »

Jobs can be completely right about the importance of what he calls “content”, but his aversion to “process” strikes me as short sighted.

Where his philosophy usually seems to break down (when others try to apply it) is positioning those two things at odds with each other. You absolutely need both once you reach a certain scale. You also need to ensure they don’t conflict with one another.

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

#138

Post by asveikau »

yodsanklai wrote: post #38
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. 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…

My experience with those big companies and those tough but allegedly fair review processes is that management has no idea who is actually doing the work, and disproportionately compensates people they like on a personal level, unfairly. The bias reenforces itself when the "top performers" are preferentially assigned prestigious work that can look good on the next review. You can tell who the stupidest people in the organization are by the faith they have in the fairness and appropriateness of the review system.

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

#139

Post by jancsika »

closeparen wrote: post #125
billy99k wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

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.

The problem here is that once you have a metric for outsized compensation you make it 10x easier for a cheater to snatch it up merely by turning it into a target. (Lines of code, commits, etc.)

What's worse is that your metric is as likely to be out of sync as code comments. If you're lucky you can notice that a) a new "10x" is actually adding value in a way you never thought to measure, and b) you already spent that 10x money on the employees whose "10x" is hacking your metrics as targets. More likely, you just notice "a" and not "b."

I think the outrage over this goes all the way back to the Greeks. IIRC Plato had a Socratic dialogue about the politician generally beating the expert in debate because the politician is an expert in persuasion. "Being an engineer" isn't a solution because, as you imply, at some point the engineer has to pay the bills. And it's at that point they are out of their element and subject to the politician who specializes in persuading engineers to do things.

If I were wrong, engineers would have long used a web-of-trust to publicly post their salaries (or perhaps anonymized statistics derived from them) to ensure companies aren't taking advantage of anyone at scale.

Edit: clarification

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