Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

inc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 287 posts

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

#151

Post by leandot »

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…

I agree that there is typically a "superstar", but it's rarely the ones that believe they are a superstar. Often times the so-called "superstar adds so much abstraction and complexity to a product that it feels only they can deal with it, because the rest of the team can't and does not want to deal with it. Work piles up and moves very slowly and it feels the "superstar" is the only one who does the job. Then superstar burns out, quits and leaves the "mediocre" team to deal with the mess.

For me a "superstar" is a friendly capable coder, who simplifies, teaches and learns in a feedback loop. They are indeed very rare.

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

#152

Post by davidmurdoch »

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…

The type of person you are describing is not what others are talking about.

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

#153

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #8
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you count negative value developers I can totally believe in a 10x one. It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers. Realistically, they would be very uncommon, and odds are that your small company has 0 of them. Of the developers I know that are actual superstars when compared to average developers, they have zero problem displaying their value and make upwards…

Well, if you have developers with negative value, and a 10x developer... 10x a negative is even more negative.

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

#154

Post by jerf »

icedchai wrote: post #124
dpflan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ha…

It took me a while to figure out the underlying problem with "group projects" in school, but I think what I eventually settled on is that there's no way for the grader to have any insight into the group dynamics. Or at least, after some non-trivial thought on the topic, I haven't come up with any. This creates certain inevitable pathologies; why shouldn't the whole group just sort of bet on one of their members doing all the work? Many of these people wouldn't even care if they only get a C out of it, really.

But that doesn't match the real world. In the real world managers dig into that all the time. They develop understandings of the performance of individual team members. If they don't, we call that a pathology and it's their fault because they have all the tools and time they need to do it. Certainly many fail at that and there are plenty of complaints about that in this discussion, but it isn't inevitable the way it is for a school grader.

I see no way to resolve this gap, and as a result, my recommendation, for all the zero good it will do, is that schools need to just accept they can't really simulate a group project and stop assigning them.

For those stuck in them in school, I have no particular advice. I'm not sure what I would do myself if I were placed in such a scenario again. Probably just grumble and be the guy doing the project again.

But for those in a work situation, you have a reasonably good chance of having an option you may not realize: Document, document, document! Document that your current task is blocked on $SLACKER's work. Document that you added unit tests to $SLACKER's work around your needs and they failed and you sent it back. Document that they broke the unit tests to make them pass and it still doesn't meet your needs. Document, document, document.

There's two reasons for this: One, it covers your own bum. You will find that even if at first you may be pushed into being a "team player" there does generally come a point where SLACKER needs to contribute something meaningful themselves to be of any value. Second, to get an employee fired nowadays, you need a solid documentation trail. If your manager does not or can not make one, well, they don't really have to. You can go a long ways towards providing HR with one yourself.

I don't guarantee that will work in every situation, but I would suggest that you not let your cynicism block you from at least trying here. And to be honest, if that just completely doesn't work and you are in a situation where HR is just perfectly OK with a paper trail of documented lack of performance over a period of time, well, maybe that's a signal it's time to leave. Even a cynic can see that paper makes the world go round and you can often turn that to your own advantage with just a bit of effort.

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

#155

Post by duxup »

bart_spoon wrote: post #113
duxup wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea here is folks get too enamored with / focused on the process and not the content or product result. Not that you don’t need process.

Ok but who is actually saying the content/product result isn’t important? Seems like a strawman.

I’ve definitely worked with companies that as Steve described where the process(es) get most of the focus and not the content.

If the content is not good, the only tool some managers seem to have is process.

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

#156

Post by reactordev »

jerf wrote: post #144
iwontberude wrote: post #117

Earlier 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…

"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…

I agree, if they are interjecting themselves into everything and taking all the “cool projects”, they aren’t superstars - they’re supera$$høles.

A real superstar would empower the team with that extra sprinkle of confidence so they can tackle the cool projects and succeed. They should be SWAT, not Mayor.

I’m sorry you feel this way and you should bring this up with your manager.

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

#157

Post by Dave_Rosenthal »

hef19898 wrote: post #84
jimnotgym wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

Saying "a star can't do it without a team" is very silly. That's like saying "well, sure but Shakespeare couldn't have written anything with a pen". True at some level, but I think we both know in that equation whether the pen or the man was more valuable. The point is that teams are necessary, but in many cases, are easier to come by than stars. Engineering stars do exist. Not all are loose cannons, like in popular culture. Some just do great work that others can't.

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

#158

Post by [deleted] »

jancsika wrote: post #139
closeparen wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#159

Post by tesdinger »

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…

Here in Germany, we had a bad experience listening to our superstar Adolf and decided we should try democracy next time. Some parts of.the political party AFD is trying to change that, unsuccessfully, so far.

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

#160

Post by fifilura »

mlrtime wrote: post #134
fifilura wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

Yes obviously it is a metaphor.

And I am speaking from my experience and yours is different.

Just that I have felt lately that the "hit by a bus" card has been played too often close to me and it makes progress slow down.

And I feel that when it does happen, organizations are much more resilient than the worst case that is often painted.

(Changing subject) I am actually pretty intrigued by case 2A in my post, I have seen this often and sometimes it has been me.

What causes someone to step up and more importantly what prevents them from doing so before? Because it means that many orgnanizations have this as an untapped resource.

What should they do to release that resource earlier?

Post reply on HN