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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

#141

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

Because it's temporary.

That is, if the company hires you, they hire you (in theory) forever. But if they contract with you, that's usually for the duration of the contract - a few months. A higher rate but for a short time is easier to justify than a slightly lower, but still high, rate forever.

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

#142

Post by AnimalMuppet »

asveikau wrote: post #132
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 quan…

My personal theory is that the most important person at a company, the one most responsible for the company's success, isn't the president or CEO. It's not the star contributor or the one who writes the most lines of code.

It's whoever makes the coffee. Because without the coffee, a whole lot less work gets done.

Don't forget whoever replaces the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, either.

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

#143

Post by AnimalMuppet »

hef19898 wrote: post #97
thereisnospork wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad. The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.

I didn't say anything about salaries, did I? Which team so do you think would do better: - Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs - the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys What do you think?

Backup team of the Cowboys (or any NFL team) would absolutely destroy Brady and a high school team.

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

#144

Post by jerf »

iwontberude wrote: post #117
glitchc wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

"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."

Are you sure you've got a "superstar" there?

I think the term ought to be reserved for people who truly do a lot of good work, and not the many varieties of people who manage to make it look like they're doing lots of good work. Which absolutely exist, and need terminology to talk about them, and sharing strategies to deal with them is a good thing to do. But while I'm sure there's a non-zero set of people who are both superstars and very good at giving the appearance of doing a lot of work and being very political about it, I doubt there are many. That's a very particular order off the metaphorical menu of attributes.

I would expect a real superstar to be happy to find that you can carry a meaningful portion of the load. There is always more work to do than can be done. Being able to not do some of it allows them to focus somewhere else.

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

#145

Post by shagie »

tucnak wrote: post #115
tomjakubowski wrote: post #110

Earlier 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.

That was a Canadian. It was coined by Jordan Peterson in 12 Rules for Life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson

> Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 12 June 1962) is a Canadian psychologist, author, and media commentator.

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

#146

Post by apwell23 »

iwontberude wrote: post #117
glitchc wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

> They take all of the interesting ownership

How do they get to "take" as an IC.

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

#147

Post by apwell23 »

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.

> how they'd justify the 1.5x expense.

Because of lack of benefits, don't have to go through unions to fire ect.

Same reason you pay higher on a short term apartmentlease.

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

#148

Post by kragen »

smackeyacky wrote: post #107
kragen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully . astoundingly successfully actually

In the 80s it was an astounding success with the Apple ][ then it all went to shit funded by that machine. He didn’t invent the LaserWriter. Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field. Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire compute…

he didn't invent shit, he certainly didn't invent the apple ii, he didn't even invent the blue box he and woz sold! but he did force apple to do the adobe deal to ship the laserwriter even though it meant sinking a large chunk of cash into risky startup equity. i don't think apple's post-apple-2 jobs-driven trajectory in the 01980s (bringing guis, desktop publishing, vector graphics, and laser printers to the masses) can be fairly described as 'it all went to shit' in terms of jobs's goals. from the perspective of user freedom and empowerment, plausibly, and that improved dramatically when they kicked jobs out

next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s

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

#149

Post by Enginerrrd »

glitchc wrote: post #16
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…

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…

>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.

Yeah this is spot on. My time in engineering has taught me that the world is falling apart, always and forever. There is a relentless decay eating everything around you and it's often only the heroic acts of surprisingly few high-quality people that keep it going to tomorrow.

Those people are rare, perhaps around 0.5-5% of the population or less depending on where you draw the boundaries. But they can be found in all different walks of life. I know one that was a UPS driver for 30 years. Not a remarkable profession, but he is a remarkable guy. School was about the only thing he wasn't a high-performer in with the exception of high-school sports. But he can solve basically any problem. Even those out of his depth, because he knows when something is out of his depth and he also knows who to pull in to consult. He knows EVERYONE and everyone that knows him owes him a favor because he uses his undying energy and hard work to help them all. At work, they begged him to become a manager but he refused the position over and over. But they would screen every new hire through him to see if they were worth keeping. When something would go wrong, they called him. I remember one instance when there was an interruption to the entire local area fuel AND power supply and the warehouse was therefore out of operation because their backup generators didn't have enough fuel. So... they just called him in the middle of the night and by God, he had the problem solved by 4 am that day and still showed up for work. His breadth of skill and knowledge is also incredible, but I'll save the reader some time and omit those stories.

Despite being rare gems of people, you paradoxically seem to run into these people everywhere because they tend to be so prolific and well connected. Effective managers learn to just funnel their problems through these people with enough lead time to keep the whole team operational.

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

#150

Post by reactordev »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #149
glitchc wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

>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. Yeah this is spot on. My time in engineering has taught me that the world is falling apart, always…

Speaking of the world falling apart and there’s decay all around you, you should try sailing.

The corrosive forces of the ocean combined with what-ever-that-is growing on your bottom hull reminds you it’s a constant battle between human nature and Mother Nature.

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