271–280 of 287 posts
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.
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-organizat…
I like the comparison of content over process. In my experience a small team full of highly skilled engineers that are motivated to get stuff done don't need much process because they will do the right thing. But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. Nothing drives me…
> But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Doesn't the growth and the adoption of those that don't have the skill handicap everyone else? I've seen quite a few teams kneecap them…
The small high-performing team is a fleeting state that will eventually be infiltrated by the average performer. Ideally you recognize when this is happening, implement the required processes and push through it to come out the other side as a slightly less efficient team that still gets more done because there is enough personnel to make up for the efficiency loss.
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So in essence you apply for regular employment and when you get turned down you pitch your consulting service? On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well, but with kid on the way I am worried I won't be able to find clients...
> On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well... Not getting paid? Are you trying to break into an industry with an unpaid internship or is this a hack-a-thon side project? I don't understand how structuring an independent contractor offering will get you paid by the same folks who aren't paying you at the mome…
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I admit I was sometimes carried. In creative work this is bound to happen. All people firing on all cylinders and coordinating well is a rarity in creative work. It might work in a kitchen or sailing boat though.
There's several types of "carrying". You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff. This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them. The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardles…
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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.
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.
This seems not true. I suspect one of many things Jobs and Cook have in common many tech leaders lack is "taste", a refined ability to curate well.
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.
Imagine if he wasn't so short sighted the value of the firm he could have created over the long term.
PS. I think you're also right, in that I don't see any aversion to process in Jobs, I see an aversion to contentless process people. Jobs loved a quality process.
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…
Of course, this is a contrived example and even rockstars make mistakes too, but many mistakes are detectable/foreseeable and that’s the kind of thing good process is meant to help with.
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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)…
NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever.
NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.