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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#61

Post by civilized »

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…

Today I worked with Company B, founded by former workers in Company A who were sick of Company A's dishonest, high-pressure, customer-hostile sales tactics (which I personally experienced).

The guys who left Company A didn't stop Company A from continuing to be the #1 provider of widgets (for now). I'm sure the Company A stock price didn't care.

I'm still very glad I get to work with Company B rather than Company A.

There is still such a thing as honor among men.

Re: Individuals Matter

#62

Post by hsn915 »

jcims wrote: post #36

I'm an introvert, I love working from home, I live in the woods with a 1/3rd mile long driveway. Since my youngest went off to college I'm here alone with her fish and a cat. I go into town once or twice a week for supplies and the rest of the time I'm just out here in my little sanctuary enjoying the lack of people. That said, even I know that while individuals matter, teams matter more. And I don't see anything in…

Individuals matter for the team as well.

Put a person who doesn't get along with people as a team leader and watch what happens.

Re: Individuals Matter

#63

Post by lmilcin »

jcims wrote: post #36

I'm an introvert, I love working from home, I live in the woods with a 1/3rd mile long driveway. Since my youngest went off to college I'm here alone with her fish and a cat. I go into town once or twice a week for supplies and the rest of the time I'm just out here in my little sanctuary enjoying the lack of people. That said, even I know that while individuals matter, teams matter more. And I don't see anything in…

"Individuals matter" does not mean that teams do not.

The "individuals matter" is contrasted with "individuals do not matter" and not with "teams matter".

If you think about this it is exactly pro-team. It means that the team is built from the people that compose the team and people are sometimes intimately linked together through the circumstances in which the team was built and cannot be easily replaced. The team building is path dependent and that path cannot be easily replicated.

There are even examples of this in the article.

Re: Individuals Matter

#64

Post by Sniffnoy »

jcims wrote: post #36

I'm an introvert, I love working from home, I live in the woods with a 1/3rd mile long driveway. Since my youngest went off to college I'm here alone with her fish and a cat. I go into town once or twice a week for supplies and the rest of the time I'm just out here in my little sanctuary enjoying the lack of people. That said, even I know that while individuals matter, teams matter more. And I don't see anything in…

That doesn't go against the point of this article, it enhances it. Teams mattering reduces the fungibility of people even further.

Re: Individuals Matter

#65

Post by andrei_says_ »

paxys wrote: post #38
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 the same kind of bullshit as teams being penalized for meeting 100% of their goals because it means that their goals weren't aggressive enough. I can't say whether the strategy is effective or not, but MBA types seem to love it.

MBAs I think see it as an indicator that they are not using g the resource at capacity.

Re: Individuals Matter

#66

Post by 3grdlurker »

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…

It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent.

It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be said—I’m sure you have the freedom to say that to people if you’re prepared for the consequences. It’s just that it’s such a hasty, unnuanced thing to say, and business decisions should not be made on the basis of rash remarks that aren’t very well thought-out.

Re: Individuals Matter

#67

Post by tharkun__ »

csee wrote: post #47
tharkun__ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that one shouldn't keep mishires around I wonder how you established that the rate of mishires is 10-20%. Seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You don't know the actual rate if managers aren't firing the mishires. If you pressure managers into randomly firing 10-20% of their people you can't calculate the rate. In fact 50% of one team might be mishires while another is 100% made up of great en…

I knew the rate because I was on the ground working with the underperformers. But as to how to translate this into HR policy in a large org, I have no idea.

I would venture that you really can't if you want to be accurate and fair.

You were on the ground, which to me implies that you had a local view of the rate. In your area the observed rate of mishires apparently was around 10-20%. If you were in another team/part of the org you might have thought 50% or 0%.

My guess is that HR does exactly this sort of thing. Someone did a study once and averaged numbers that were obtained 'somehow' and that is then simply applied.

Like stack ranking. Everything is a normal distribution, right?

If you ask me: What large orgs are not good at is doing what actually makes sense. It's too much work and there is so much that could go wrong anyway. The way out are blanket policies implemented by drones, bean counters, the odd psychopath etc.

Re: Individuals Matter

#68

Post by csee »

tharkun__ wrote: post #67
csee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew the rate because I was on the ground working with the underperformers. But as to how to translate this into HR policy in a large org, I have no idea.

I would venture that you really can't if you want to be accurate and fair. You were on the ground, which to me implies that you had a local view of the rate. In your area the observed rate of mishires apparently was around 10-20%. If you were in another team/part of the org you might have thought 50% or 0%. My guess is that HR does exactly this sort of thing. Someone did a study once and averaged numbers that were ob…

I observed the local rate, correct. I didn't really make a claim that a large org would be exactly the same as my local rate, so I agree with you that it could differ. But honestly, I do believe it would be over 0.1 for most orgs, just based on my experience with people in college and other areas of life. Competence at a high level is really rare and most people just are really not good at complicated tasks, even many graduates from top schools.

Re: Individuals Matter

#69

Post by kmonsen »

csee wrote: post #47
tharkun__ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that one shouldn't keep mishires around I wonder how you established that the rate of mishires is 10-20%. Seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You don't know the actual rate if managers aren't firing the mishires. If you pressure managers into randomly firing 10-20% of their people you can't calculate the rate. In fact 50% of one team might be mishires while another is 100% made up of great en…

I knew the rate because I was on the ground working with the underperformers. But as to how to translate this into HR policy in a large org, I have no idea.

Maybe it was the environment, that a lot of these people could be better if supported the right way? Or to say it simply (and please understand I know nothing about you so it is not meant as a criticism of how you personally work), maybe it was because they worked with you?

I would also say that throwing x% and hiring again does not work well. The pool you are hiring from is people that are not happy somewhere else. You are not getting a 90% chance of finding a "good" person.

Re: Individuals Matter

#70

Post by a_square_peg »

jcims wrote: post #36

I'm an introvert, I love working from home, I live in the woods with a 1/3rd mile long driveway. Since my youngest went off to college I'm here alone with her fish and a cat. I go into town once or twice a week for supplies and the rest of the time I'm just out here in my little sanctuary enjoying the lack of people. That said, even I know that while individuals matter, teams matter more. And I don't see anything in…

I agree. I think there is a strange trend of fetishicization of individual contributor capacity in tech world, some sort of hero syndrome. Even a lot of posts about 'culture' and 'organization' end up being about how at the end of the day these affect individual performance not how well the organization performs overall. Maybe we can all take lessons from playing in a team sport - it's true that the team will do poorly if each individual contributors perform poorly on their own for whatever reason but what wins the game is not about how well everyone played on their own.
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