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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

#251

Post by ryanisnan »

pas wrote: post #223
namdnay wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I always say is that McDonalds have laminated recipes pinned to the wall. A Michelin starred restaurant doesn't. Both of these are good processes

but, but, but ... they are remarkably similar in execution, the difference is the trade offs they chose. if you pay 200+ bucks per mouth you want something amazing, and that usually means you pick from a fixed menu (interestingly your choices likely be a lot more limited compared to McDonald's), and that restaurant then does the well rehearsed dance and prepares the fancy food for you, with a lot more attention to de…

That was the OP’s point…

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

#252

Post by iwontberude »

apwell23 wrote: post #176
ochoseis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every team and individual have their own norms, but some people just take the agency to get shit done. In other words, when there’s work to be done they don’t feel the need to ask permission.

Can't OP do the same then instead of waiting on a team member to burn out . I think OP is barking up the wrong tree because the problem seems that their manager doesn't believe in them or maybe OP doesn't believe in themselves to step up and take responsibility .

I want them to do less and let the team fail instead of personally holding the team up. Our team needs to fail and learn lessons but this individual is so astoundingly good that they can carry us.

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

#253

Post by srj »

ryandrake wrote: post #212
aardvark179 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes there is just more work to be done than that small team can handle. It’s often extremely effective to have a small highly skilled team explore an area and chart out a path, and then expand that team so the core won’t be working on the problem for the next ten years.

I think an underrated skill is the ability to say no to work that "has to be done." You're maybe taking it as a given that there is this list of -stuff- that simply has to be done, and therefore we need a bigger team to do it. Often that -stuff- are features nobody wants, UI re-designs for their own sake, and adding metrics nobody is going to look at. Many companies lack this ability to curate so we get the software…

My lens on this is colored through my own big company experience, but I've found it is the bad manager in this scenario who would be promoted. After all, they're managing such a large org - they have to be promoted.

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

#254

Post by thereisnospork »

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?

How else do you define rockstar? Does being worth 100x the next guy not qualify? This is specifically relevant because football is a salary cap sport - every dollar on Brady is money not spent on someone else and therefore is a direct reflection of his measured value on the field.[0] As opposed to euro-football or older F1, where budgets are more flexible.

To your question: You can always saddle a 'rockstar' with enough negative-value players to result in poor overall performance. You've contriving an irrelevant situation -- also one where you've put 53 rockstars,[1] against a bunch of highschoolers plus one rockstar. Just about every player on the Dallas cowboys, except maybe the kicker/punter would drag an average highschool to the state championship.

[0]And we all know how that has turned out over the last 20 odd years.

[1]Rockstar-ship is situational/relative - the backup RB on the cowboys is a scrub in the NFL. He would also be the best highdchool player in the country by a large margin (aka a rockstar).

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

#255

Post by [deleted] »

duxup wrote: post #29
colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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.

I feel like I'm experiencing this in a distant way at a small company I'm working at. We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is…

[deleted]

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

#256

Post by p1esk »

duxup wrote: post #29
colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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.

I feel like I'm experiencing this in a distant way at a small company I'm working at. We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is…

It sounds like you have a product manager mindset.

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

#257

Post by caminante »

thesumofall wrote: post #26

Why 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…

> Why would we see a 80/20 distribution...?

You're mis-quoting. Here's the quote:

> Organizational researchers have shown, similar to the 80/20 rule, the majority of your company's output comes from a minority of "superstar" performers: What's known as a power-law distribution.

The cutoff is arbitrary, e.g. one of the cited studies uses a 5/95 cutoff. [0]

[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...

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

#258

Post by caminante »

duxup wrote: post #29
colund wrote: post #5

Jobs 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.

I feel like I'm experiencing this in a distant way at a small company I'm working at. We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is…

It sounds like you're caring about the process (not the content).

What's blocking you from shipping the feature (as you see it) or raising your concern up the organization?

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

#259

Post by Sammi »

Sateeshm wrote: post #55
gieksosz wrote: post #37

If you yourself feel like an under appreciated superstar this kind of article will surely resonate with you (it is HN after all). I personally find the premise unlikely, without good process you cannot get a larger group of people to do anything consistently.

Yes. Can't really scale well without good process. And it's flat out unrealistic for a large org to hire only superstars. You're gonna have a ton of open positions for years.

"Can't really scale well without good process"

Tell that to almost all Y Combinator unicorns. They're all famous for internal chaos.

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

#260

Post by cudgy »

whstl wrote: post #195
cudgy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. Your work eliminates jobs and transfers their salary to the business owner! Seems more like bean counting than tech. Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.

That's a good point, but I would argue that lack of digitalisation is a real bottleneck for industries. Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand. Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people availabl…

There are only so many PCBs and cupcakes that the world needs. Consolidation displaces competitors and their employees/jobs.

My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.

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