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Moneyball teams

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Re: Moneyball teams

#141

Post by afpx »

peteretep wrote: post #140
afpx wrote: post #139

The 'best' is so subjective as to be meaningless. I have worked with probably 500 software engineers, and I have been the best of all of them. (Well, one guy was probably as good as me.) But, maybe this is only because I value things that a lot of other people don't? My criteria are just different. I have led teams that developed software resulting in 4 successful (another subjective word, but in this case, acquired)…

> I have been the best of all of them What's your metric for that? How would you have known if you weren't?

Haha - exactly.

Re: Moneyball teams

#142

Post by hinkley »

peteretep wrote: post #140
afpx wrote: post #139

The 'best' is so subjective as to be meaningless. I have worked with probably 500 software engineers, and I have been the best of all of them. (Well, one guy was probably as good as me.) But, maybe this is only because I value things that a lot of other people don't? My criteria are just different. I have led teams that developed software resulting in 4 successful (another subjective word, but in this case, acquired)…

> I have been the best of all of them What's your metric for that? How would you have known if you weren't?

Well, that's the problem isn't it? All you have are confirmation and survivor biases to work with. You're going to get a lousy outcome.

Someone with far more practical experience than you might sound paranoid about some things you don't even think about, and blasé about others (because they have ways to mitigate the problem if it actually happens). You won't know enough to realize why they aren't on board with your priorities, and you will make conclusions that have no basis in reality.

You've only known this person for 45 minutes. You've known yourself for decades. Which one are you going to assume is the idiot in this situation? How often are you going to be wrong? And how would you ever know if you were wrong? You just kicked this person out of your life because you didn't like their answer. If they become lead developer at your biggest competitor, are you even going to remember their name?

Re: Moneyball teams

#143

Post by hinkley »

humanrebar wrote: post #122
ryandrake wrote: post #109

Another way to look at it is: What causes projects to succeed or fail? I've seen my share of failed projects throughout my career (as a participant and as a co-worker watching it happen). By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak, or because they didn't hire "rockstar" programmers, or because the engineers didn't go to Stanford. They failed because of things like…

> By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak... YMMV here. I've seen many projects fail because teams unnecessarily accumulated technical debt of various sorts. I guess you could blame management for not knowing about it or prioritizing correctly or something, but good engineers know that you have to include technical cleanup in the feature estimate or you'll end u…

I've seen some of those failures but made a different conclusion: None of those teams had the balls to say 'no' any time management got even a little bit upset about anything.

Now, part of that is on the engineers, but the only solution I know of is solidarity. But a lot of it came from systematic abuse from the project managers, wearing them down and then calling them incompetent when they couldn't deliver.

Just like this article says farther down, everybody is good at something. I've only had to talk about firing a handful of people (rather than reassigning) and it was always because they were belligerent to progress, or because of Dunning-Kruger Effect - they would not admit they weren't good at something and keep creating 2x as much work for everybody else who has to clean up after them.

Punishing people because they aren't good at everything is just some sadistic bullshit that makes small men feel important, and a lot of those are attracted to middle management. It's twisted and wrong and only rarely does a company succeed with that kind of corporate culture. And when they do there are always memoirs from the victims.

Re: Moneyball teams

#144

Post by georgeecollins »

yazan94 wrote: post #55
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a former (large, organizationally deficient) company, there was this small team of 5 people with very different specialties (and personalities). They were a "strike team" of sorts, tasked with helping out at a technical level different projects that were in trouble. They were excellent. They saved my team's integration of a camera co-processor in an SoC. But finally a re-org came around and some high-level manager…

How do you measure and quantify a team's quality when joining? Especially if you are moving from a different company, I feel like it is probably impossible to know as you may only meet a small subset of the team you work with, if you even get to meet anyone on your future team at all.

I would say: - Look at what they have accomplished. But be sure you are looking at accomplishments of the actual team, not people who are taking the credit (that is a little trickier). - See if there is relaxed communication and trust. - Ask everyone individually what the goal of the team or the goal of the project is. Really talented teams sometimes put their individual goals ahead of the overall goal. As in: the front end engineer says a responsive front end is most important, an AI dev. says deep learning is the key feature etc. All can be talented and well meaning. But if everybody doesn't agree on the trade offs, effectiveness will suffer.

Re: Moneyball teams

#145

Post by sien »

BurningFrog wrote: post #40
georgeecollins wrote: post #11

I wish I could triple like this! Hire the best is lazy thinking. * I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star". * I have worked places where they only hire "superstars"-- and were pretty serious about paying for good talent and being picky-- and still failed for all kinds of organizational reasons. Teams with more role players, or more cohesion…

Imagine if you picked a sports team by the most paid players in their league. The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.

The soccer team would be Real Madrid.

The baseball team the New York Yankees.

They seem to do OK.

Re: Moneyball teams

#146

Post by jtraffic »

I used to play basketball almost every week at the university gym. There were these guys in their 60's who still played with 19-25 year olds and routinely won. I asked one of them if he saw one particular thing young people tended to ignore. He said, without hesitation, "the team game."

There is probably some bias, the young guys probably didn't play quite as hard as they would have otherwise, but I'm really not convinced that accounts for the entire story.

Maybe it's just as simple as: interaction effects on teams are often stronger than main effects.

Re: Moneyball teams

#147

Post by xapata »

caseysoftware wrote: post #48
Evolved wrote: post #35

One of my favorite movies, Miracle about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that upset the Soviets, had this dialogue that actually happened between Head Coach Herb Brooks and Assistant Head Coach Craig Patrick. I feel it applies here. Patrick: This is the final roster? You're kidding me, right? You're missing some of the best players. Brooks: I'm not looking for the best players, Craig. I'm looking for the right ones…

Which implies something major that everyone is glossing over: If the "right people" aren't the same as the "best people" are the criteria we're using for "best" correct?

That's just a folksy way of explaining local vs global optima. Best in one context is often not best in other contexts.

Re: Moneyball teams

#148

Post by ethbro »

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #76
sanswork wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my most enjoyable periods while working for someone else was at CapGemini when I was between teams and lent out to do short term fixes for teams where they didn't have enough developer resources/the right resources. Typically just a week or two to go in figure out what was going wrong and patch their systems then get swapped. I don't know if it was the change of pace or the fact that you kind of got to feel li…

I had a similar stint helping teams with system performance issues. I think I found it so enjoyable for two reasons: 1) Solving the problems involved the focused exercising of all of my software dev knowledge – often around database access, sometimes around garbage collection and memory allocation of the specific platform. 2) The impact was highly visible and appreciated (by the team, management, and system users), a…

If there were one key benefit of consulting / being an internal developer at large it would be the ability to leave after finishing a project.

Sometimes that's sad. (When the client / team is awesome)

But usually it means not having to deal with any of the worst parts of office politics. (E.g. de facto stack ranking, non-merit-based favoritism jockying, office management politics, dysfunctional management priorities, waiting for someone to die / retire for a promotion, etc)

Re: Moneyball teams

#149

Post by ryandrake »

humanrebar wrote: post #125
ryandrake wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably that's always a risk regardless of whether you hired someone junior and trained them or whether you hired someone already skilled. As long as you're doing the standard things that help you retain talent (like paying market rate, providing good opportunities, etc.), there should be no reason to worry, right? The only companies that should be worried about "poaching"[1] are the ones, for example, who are not…

> The only companies that should be worried about "poaching" are the ones, for example, who are not paying market rate.... Well, "only" is implying it's not almost universal. Companies routinely pay market rate for new hires and then base raises and bonuses on KPIs for individuals, teams, or the whole organization. Are there companies that say, "Well, we had a mediocre year, but market rate for devs went up 8%, so I…

Or they leave for a company paying new hires market rate.

The job market doesn't care if your company had a mediocre year, any more than your suppliers care. If the price of screws or cables goes up 8% you either pay it, look around for something cheaper, or negotiate. Somehow, when it comes to labor, companies think paying “what we paid last year plus N%” makes sense.

I guess the take-away here is: Companies by and large do not worry about poaching. Rather, they are willing to live with it because they see the alternative as too expensive.

Re: Moneyball teams

#150

Post by saghm »

sien wrote: post #145
BurningFrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if you picked a sports team by the most paid players in their league. The football team would be half quarterbacks, the hockey team mostly goalies and so on.

The soccer team would be Real Madrid. The baseball team the New York Yankees. They seem to do OK.

The baseball team currently with the highest roster salary is not the Yankees, but the Los Angeles Dodgers by almost 20%. They're currently in third place, behind teams with the 16th and 26th highest roster salaries (out of 30 MLB teams)[1].

Obviously it's early on the season, but we can look at last year's season to get a better heuristic. The top two teams in terms of roster salary were once again the Dodgers and Yankees. The Dodgers did come in first in their division but finished the season 12.5 games behind the eventual World Series winners, the Chicago Cubs, whose roster salary was barely 2/3 of the Dodgers. Oh, and the Yankees came in fourth place (of five) in their division, a whole nine games out of first place.

So yes, spending money helps you be a contender, but spending the most money is not a good metric for the best team (at least, not in baseball, and I'd imagine that being smarter about spending your money rather than spending more is useful in other fields as well).

http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/2017/ http://www.spotrac.com/mlb/payroll/2016/ http://m.mlb.com/standings/?yyyy=2016&view=divisional

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