There are no bozos, just elitists. I prefer a respectful anarchy to an oligarchy.
The Bozo Event Horizon
71–80 of 106 posts
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#72A constrained elite does seem useful within an organization. I like the idea of distinguishing those engineers who go above and beyond and really create something new. However it can also become a gerontocracy easily and can limit the adoption of innovative ideas in the long run. The problem I have with these sorts of social structures is that it assumes that one person out of a hundred is some how "gifted." After re…
I think the message is that there are certain strata that you should be VERY careful and thoughtful about letting people into. I don't think that is the entry level, but at higher levels of an organization, incompetence can be malicious in a sense.
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#73Irony: complaining about bozos and then writing this sentence: "Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something (the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so elegant that you just smile when you use them."
Yeah, I saw that too.
I would never, ever describe James Gosling as a bozo, but he doesn't make my top 50 list of language designers and researchers. Java started with a laudable goal to improve upon C, but they didn't take enough risks at the start.
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#74The old hiring slogan, which they used in the MSFT hiring and hammered even harder in hiring manager training was, "As hire As; Bs hire Cs."
to expound on that, A people are not usually afraid of competition or a challenge.. often welcome working with people smarter, more talented or productive than themselves.
B people are more interested in protecting what they have, and to keep what you have, you may be able to out perform a C player, this the interst in hiring C players.
honestly, I think everyone is self conscious, or a little afraid from time to time, and that is OK, you just need to be able to get past it, have a little Faith in your abilities, work hard and don't expect raises, praise or titles (which ever your favorite flavor of sucess us) until you work hard and accomplish something.
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#75The old hiring slogan, which they used in the MSFT hiring and hammered even harder in hiring manager training was, "As hire As; Bs hire Cs."
Who hired the Bs?
your comment was probably in jest, but honestly, hiring is really really hard. no matter how hard you try to screen, test, and filter candidates, applicants and recruits, you never know for sure what performance you are going to get, or how this performance will change over time. the absolute hardest is personal fit within a team (back to a players like a players), but if you have high performers competing instead of working together you get that herding cats syndrome.
where is that old superbowl commercial of herding cats. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk7yqlTMvp8&feature=youtu...
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Microsoft discovered a process of getting out of an event horizon. The work they're doing right now is very interesting.
They bought Kinect, other than that I can't see any real innovation in the last 5 years. Consider there is plenty of talk about surface, but they where talking about it before the iPad came out and it's still little more than a tech demo. Bing is not bad, but it's interface is on par with Duck Duck Go and hardly the 'revolution' in search they were hoping for. That said, they do seem to keep refining things and that'…
We must have very different definitions of innovation, or even success. So you're saying the Windows Phone and Metro isn't at all innovative? How do you figure?
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, which is to say that yes if you don't change you can avoid this fate, but not changing is its own form of death. One of the amazing things of being at a successful company is that each passing quarter increasing revenue brings a bigger pool to spend on doing things, and there are so many things you want to do. But you can't do everything yourself, and growing means hiring, and hiring means getting larger. Pe…
What I like about your answer is how you kind of say that's not possible and then immediately hit on one way it might be possible. Why should the only kind of growth people recognize in companies be the kind that terminates in ossified monoliths? Isn't this a failure of imagination on our part? Life doesn't usually offer only one way to grow. I'm excited by the idea of a small organization whose revenue grows much fa…
"What I like about your answer is how you kind of say that's not possible and then immediately hit on one way it might be possible."
Its an engineering crutch, like people walking around in a building cannot cause it to fall down, but if everyone jumped at the exact same cadence they could. Any thing is possible, sometimes the requirements to get there are so difficult the solution becomes effectively impossible.
If you consider Google as an example, the roughly 1,500 people who are in the search and ads teams make all the money for the company. Everyone else is, rounded to the nearest billion dollars, a non-contributor. But rather than accumlate cash faster than the Federal Reserve can inject it into economy, they spend it on projects which might get them into other markets. Or sometimes create entirely new markets. But that gives them size. And at both Sun and Google its pretty clear that the Bozo Event horizon hits somewhere between 10K and 15K non-sales employees. I don't know why that is, just that it has hit there two times. If Jim's reading he can pitch in DEC's number.
I agree with you're assessment that there are always other growth strategies, and I can identify things that contribute to the incursion of bozos, but that is a long way from the experiment that can show a bozo free stable organization with growing revenue.
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such people do exist. Notch, creator of Minecraft, is a good example. The guy virtually developed it himself. I'm currently developing a game myself and I can tell you, it is a lot of work. At minimum I would say the guy is at least 10 times more productive than the average developer/engineer.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of Notch's productivity is based on things he learned in previous projects. According to Wikipedia, he's been programming video games since 86. That's 26 years of experience. If you use those 26 years wisely, you'll learn a lot of different things - and more importantly, you can draw on 26 years of mistakes that you now know to avoid. I'm not saying he's not also a talented programmer -…
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Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#79Am I the only person who feels woefully inadequate whenever I read articles where phrases like "10 or 100 times as productive as the average engineer". Sorry guys, I'm trying my best! :-(
I believe productivity comes with experience and motivation.
I don't know who the so called average engineer is, but I would imagine with enough experience and drive he / she could outperform his / her previous self by a significant factor (10x perhaps?).
I assume the same rule applies to the crazy talented freaks (only with a big head start), but I can't be certain.
Re: The Bozo Event Horizon
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I like about your answer is how you kind of say that's not possible and then immediately hit on one way it might be possible. Why should the only kind of growth people recognize in companies be the kind that terminates in ossified monoliths? Isn't this a failure of imagination on our part? Life doesn't usually offer only one way to grow. I'm excited by the idea of a small organization whose revenue grows much fa…
"What I like about your answer is how you kind of say that's not possible and then immediately hit on one way it might be possible." Its an engineering crutch, like people walking around in a building cannot cause it to fall down, but if everyone jumped at the exact same cadence they could. Any thing is possible, sometimes the requirements to get there are so difficult the solution becomes effectively impossible. If…
that is a long way from the experiment that can show a bozo free stable organization with growing revenue
Agreed, but let's look at it from the other side. Suppose one such experiment did succeed. How significant would that be? (I say very. Because it would change people's thinking about what's possible.)
Also worth pointing out: such an organization wouldn't need to stop growing, just hire at a slower than traditional rate. Seems to me you could grow for a long time before hitting "between 10K and 15K non-sales employees".