Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Individuals Matter

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 419 posts

Re: Individuals Matter

#51

Post by zdragnar »

skybrian wrote: post #35

A team where you have to ask who is going to do the work is one where people can’t get help when they are in trouble. It shouldn’t matter who gets assigned to it first, if they can’t do it, someone with more experience will step in. This is what those stand up meetings were supposed to be for. It’s not supposed to be a meaningless ritual. If people can’t get help, or are afraid to ask for help, something is wrong.

An experienced person will likely take half the time of an inexperienced person who gets help.

If the inexperienced person pesters the experienced one much that it doesnt take more time, that would imply that the experienced people aren't (on paper) getting much done, because they are too busy teaching to do much else.

The actual balance of course depends on the experience gap between the assignee and assigned work, but the notion that any two people on a team will always get the same work done in the same amount of time is silly.

Re: Individuals Matter

#52

Post by SavantIdiot »

thadk wrote: post #43

It's certainly not perfect, but it is funny to me that the author on one line complains the Peace Corps "produce[s] little value" but then in the surrounding lines talks about how important it is for individuals to bridge and bring contextual incisive change that consistently resist abstractions and not just look at the problem from the outside. He's falling for his own simplification of individuals and lifetimes. Th…

> He's falling for his own simplification of individuals and lifetimes.

Totally.

> complains the Peace Corps "produce[s] little value"

This is what happens when quantitative minds encounter the real world. It's a consequence of putting engineering on a pedestal and ignoring any and all context.

However, the top comments on the thread give me hope that many more people see the thought errors in this piece than people who revere it.

EDIT: Quanti- not quali-

Re: Individuals Matter

#53

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tayo42 wrote: post #15

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…

> 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.

We also all know that abstractions leak, and sometimes... Not always! But sometimes, those leaks will kill you. CPU details are irrelevant, until per-opcode details give you a 10x speedup. Compilers are a magic black box, until a compiler bug breaks your code. Hardware is cheap, until someone notices a way to save millions by caring. And yes, sometimes developers are interchangeable, until they make or break the company.

Re: Individuals Matter

#54

Post by sdenton4 »

lewisl9029 wrote: post #48

This is also why I really love working with software, because it's one of the greatest force multipliers on the potential impact of an average individual I can think of. We don't have to be once-in-a-decade level genius visionaries or hire a gigantic team with millions in funding to build something that can make the lives of millions of people tangibly better, while capturing some/most of that value in return to impr…

> "where all software that can possibly be built by an individual/small team that adds non-trivial value has already been built"

That's why we make new JavaScript frameworks.

Re: Individuals Matter

#55

Post by dustintrex »

cushychicken wrote: post #21

the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.

It's Neutron Jack's "rank and yank" philosophy, which says you should fire the bottom 10% performers of your org every year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve

Of course firing low performers is quite different from high performers leaving, but HR doesn't see or care about these distinctions.

Re: Individuals Matter

#56

Post by john_moscow »

Swizec wrote: post #29
paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

The corporate culture serves a very specific purpose of lowering the self-esteem of the 10x folks, keeping them at their place doing 10x work at 1x salary until they burn out. This is scalable, predictable, and serves management's interests well.

It's just if you happen to be a 10x guy, for the sake of your own sanity, learn how to run a business and get out of the corporate swamp. Nothing else will bring you happiness, believe me.

Re: Individuals Matter

#57

Post by perl4ever »

chrisweekly wrote: post #14
nimish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

"Reality" is necessarily a model. Your brain doesn't see photons, doesn't touch objects, doesn't respond to audio waves.

If you are sane, then your model must not be subject to your will; therefore it is outside "you" even if within your skull, and performs as a trusted intermediary.

Re: Individuals Matter

#58

Post by Dylan16807 »

Swizec wrote: post #29
paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

"10x" is still treating people like cogs, it's just having cogs of different size.

Re: Individuals Matter

#59

Post by wombatpm »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #27
cushychicken wrote: post #21

the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.

It implies that the company isn't pushing their employees hard enough. In otherwords, if managers are doing their job "correctly" they should either (1) be pushing their staff so hard that 1 in 10 of them quit every year (2) weening out the the poorest performer.

Weeding as in remove undesirables

Weening is the process if transitioning from milk to solid food as in babies and puppies

Post reply on HN