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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

#261

Post by orliesaurus »

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…

Maybe you can talk to your team about what/how you're feeling and how it should be better to have less process and more do-the-right-thing?

Idk, is it that hopeless? Jump ships?

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

#262

Post by nebula8804 »

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…

>Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.

Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more.

Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity.

I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use.

God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.

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

#263

Post by whstl »

cudgy wrote: post #260
whstl wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not about consolidation.

The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes.

I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it.

Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with.

Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.

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

#264

Post by GuB-42 »

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 when most human abilities are distributed on a bell curve?

Generally you get normal distributions (bell curves) when you add together random variables. For example, if you roll 10 dices and add their numbers, the probability distribution will look somewhat like a bell curve. And if overall employee performance was the sum of their normally distributed human abilities, you would get another bell curve.

But it only works when add numbers. If you multiplied numbers instead of added them, you would get a log-normal distribution instead. Other processes can get you Pareto distributions (80/20).

Employee performance is a not just a sum of their individual abilities, there are some synergies happening, giving a multiplicative effect.

In other words, seeing a 80/20 type distribution shows that people are more than the sum of their parts, literally.

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

#265

Post by deanCommie »

ksec wrote: post #54

Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. It is also strange this being brought up now in 2024. Because from 2014 to 2021 or 2022, the only sentiment allowed was every employees are roughly equal. There are no high performer. No such thing as 10x programmers etc.

> Because from 2014 to 2021 or 2022, the only sentiment allowed was every employees are roughly equal. There are no high performer. No such thing as 10x programmers etc.

What a strange straw man that I can't connect to reality

What I've seen (on this site, on twitter, and on reddit) over those years was a reckoning that 10x employees aren't often worth the bullshit - their toxicity, that they may make others around them more than 10x UN-productive, and that our industry may have had a habit of treating these 10xers with kid gloves not caring the path of destruction they left of (and especially) female engineers.

Yes, I did see the occasional blog or tweet thread from some claiming that they didn't exist at all, but it was always immediately challenged because the concept is ridiculous. We've all worked with at least one 10xer (and by the way most of them WEREN'T toxic, but actually incredible, helpful, and generous).

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

#266

Post by duxup »

caminante wrote: post #258
duxup wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Need more data to be sure of what the customers needs are in order to provide the right solution.

And I’ll get it.

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

#267

Post by duxup »

orliesaurus wrote: post #261
duxup wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe you can talk to your team about what/how you're feeling and how it should be better to have less process and more do-the-right-thing? Idk, is it that hopeless? Jump ships?

It’s all good, we’re still small and ill get the information I need to write the best solution for the customer.

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

#268

Post by fxtentacle »

cudgy wrote: post #175
fxtentacle wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

You are correct and I have considered this because in general I, too, dislike the trend of profits being focused on ever fewer owners.

However, what is the better option here?

A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs.

B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs.

My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.

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

#269

Post by wolverine876 »

icelancer wrote: post #22
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.

Process is required to get mediocre talent to churn out reasonable content, which is Steve's references to HP/IBM/etc. Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what…

> Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process

Maybe top talent also does worse work sans process, but they get away with it. That's my experience: Many take advantage of their power to disregard process (sometimes as a demonstration of power), which hurts the team, and undermines and creates extra work for others, but the top talent's contributions create a net gain.

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