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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#11

Post by voz_ »

hprotagonist wrote: post #4

Granny: “There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that—” Granny: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they mean they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s…

Pratchett is amazing, one can identify his prose from a mile away. RIP to a beautiful soul.

Re: Individuals Matter

#12

Post by kasey_junk »

One thing that I always think is undervalued is how variable a single persons output is. A bad day, illness, life changes, etc all dramatically impact a person’s efficiency.

Treating even the same persons output as abstract is fraught with issues. One month a rockstar the next a schlub.

Re: Individuals Matter

#13

Post by babelfish »

It's really hard for me to take this author seriously after his "Willingness to look stupid" post that went viral here about a month ago. The entire post was ridden with a superiority complex about how he's willing to look stupid, but never willing to explain his actions that make him look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490

Re: Individuals Matter

#14

Post by chrisweekly »

nimish wrote: post #9
hammock wrote: post #3

Would like to see these thoughts applied to public health policy.

>Some people seem to view companies like a game of SimCity, where if you want more money, you can turn a knob, increase taxes, and get more money, uniformly impacting the city. But companies are not a game of SimCity. If you want more attrition and turn a knob that cranks that up, you don't get additional attrition that's sampled uniformly at random. People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the a…

> "This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model."

Yet that is precisely what classical economic theory has done, for decades! It boggles my mind how long it's taking for that kind of reductionist, simplistic, reality-ignoring "thinking" to mature.

Re: Individuals Matter

#15

Post by tayo42 »

Abstraction is necessary to deal with things at scale, on a programming focused site i think we all know that and know that often the trade off is inefficiency. Its probably to expensive to track all these peoples real value and really it doesn't even matter. What was the consequence of all these supposedly valuable people leaving? Did the stock drop after the guy saving millions a year left? Probably some pointless project was delayed that would have been delayed anyway. We are nothing but cogs in a machine that doesn't care about the cogs.

I think you'll just drive your self crazy worrying about corporate waste and monetary inefficiency (environmental might be the only thing worth thinking about). There always going to be waste and there's no awards when its fixed. I used to be concerned about money being wasted, but now, IDK why I cared in the first place. Its not my money and I don't get any of it.

Re: Individuals Matter

#16

Post by csee »

Realizing this is important for retention. It's damaging when upper management falsely thinks people are interchangeble, which is a common view among non-technical types and HR. This leads to 10x people feeling underappreciated and resentful, ultimately causing them to resign for higher compensation and more appreciation elsewhere. It can literally destroy small companies if an individual's unique contribution isn't properly understood and valued.

Managers should err away from language about "the group", "the team" or "collective" and really drill down to the level of individuals as much as is practical. This is the correct resolution for most decision making. "The team" is just an abstraction that's useful to a small extent for a certain class of decision making, but not beyond that.

Re: Individuals Matter

#17

Post by csee »

babelfish wrote: post #13

It's really hard for me to take this author seriously after his "Willingness to look stupid" post that went viral here about a month ago. The entire post was ridden with a superiority complex about how he's willing to look stupid, but never willing to explain his actions that make him look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490

Merely publishing public essays is an example of being willing to look stupid.

Re: Individuals Matter

#18

Post by eyelidlessness »

babelfish wrote: post #13

It's really hard for me to take this author seriously after his "Willingness to look stupid" post that went viral here about a month ago. The entire post was ridden with a superiority complex about how he's willing to look stupid, but never willing to explain his actions that make him look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490

Lacking emotional intelligence to explain my motivations is something I’ve struggled and worked to improve my whole life. But it doesn’t make my motivations invalid. Just harder for you to understand.

Re: Individuals Matter

#19

Post by zem »

the last paragraph made me realise, i indirectly owe my current, amazing job to that. i was on a team at work which was fine, i wasn't hyped about it or anything but my boss was good and i had found an interesting subarea of the product to work on. then i got taken off it and moved to another product that absolutely did not motivate me in any way. stuck it out for a couple of quarters, finally talked to my boss about being put back on the old product. he talked to his boss, who said no way, we need people working on the new product. that finally gave me the kick in the pants to apply to change teams to work on something i was really enthusiastic about, and i've been here ever since.

Re: Individuals Matter

#20

Post by [deleted] »

hprotagonist wrote: post #4

Granny: “There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that—” Granny: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they mean they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s…

[deleted]
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