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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#71

Post by kmonsen »

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…

Most effective people are not only because they are magical 10x people, but also because they have the right experience and knowledge in the situation. Skills and knowledge the company might have given them over years.

I think there are ways of reading this without ever thinking some people are 10x super humans while the rest are not.

Re: Individuals Matter

#73

Post by kelnos »

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 didn't get that feel out of this at all. Sure, there was mention of a few individuals who were "10x-ers", but I read it as appreciating each individual for what they can bring to the team and to the org, which is always different for each person.

The point is that people are not fungible. Some people have specialized skills, while others have a broad breadth of skills. They won't both be good at completing the same tasks, so you can't reorg to put them in positions that don't make use of their strengths and expect success.

The bit about budgets was really eye-opening. Reducing things to "headcount" instead of figuring out what kind of people you need for a team or project is a great way to fail. If you just say "hey, you can hire three level-2 people", but believe that hiring two level-3 people (assuming at your org that the total cost for both of those is the same) will be more successful, and get told you can't do that, that is a failure of the organization.

Re: Individuals Matter

#74

Post by PeterisP »

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.

The argument essentially is that it hints to there being an exploitable slack in the system.

If you treat bargaining with employees as a zero-sum game (which it really isn't, but some companies do treat it that way) then the other party being very satisfied with the bargain indicates that they would be also willing to get a worse offer. So if all the employees are extremely satisfied with the compensation/effort ratio, that indicates that you could either lower the compensation some or extract more effort until they're satisfied "just barely enough".

Re: Individuals Matter

#75

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#76

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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…

> All I see is an ode to the 10x'er and how sucking up to them might keep them around long enough to be successful.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy Dan Luu's writings and I'm thankful that he shares his thoughts.

That said, a lot of his recent writings present extremely rare, specialized situations like small teams of carefully-selected 10X-er type programmers who are hand-picked from their sterling reputations and naturally extremely motivated. If you find yourself in a top 1% unicorn team like that, a lot of his writings ring true. Trying to apply arbitrary big-company management to highly-optimized, high-performing teams like that is a mistake.

However, statistically most of us won't be working on or managing those unicorn teams. Trying to apply top-1% advice to the median team is going to result in a lot of mismatches.

Generally speaking, HN isn't a great place to get any sort of management advice. The userbase is mostly IC engineers, and as a result the upvotes tend to follow what IC engineers want to hear. Writing an article about making the difficult management choices that come with managing real-world (not top-1%) teams is hard to do without upsetting a lot of readers, so instead we get a lot of "engineers good, managers bad" type articles even if the authors start out with best intentions.

Re: Individuals Matter

#77

Post by wffurr »

andrewflnr wrote: post #42

This is cathartic to read, but I also despair at getting the people who need to hear it to take it seriously. > But many people want the world to be simple This is the source of so much insanity in the world, not just with regard to allocating labor. Details matter, but people who plan "timelines" desperately don't want to hear it. They can go through whole careers without being forced out of the cozy illusion that t…

There's a great book about this called "Seeing Like a State".

Re: Individuals Matter

#79

Post by tharkun__ »

csee wrote: post #68
tharkun__ wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 man…

I definitely would agree that a lot of people in large orgs are unfortunately like that. I can corroborate that from having been in many of those. I can also attest to the fact that most managers don't deal with this. There is a lot of moving people around or simply ignoring the problem.

Now like my earlier sibling mentions, just because someone isn't a top performer at their current job at the current time doesn't mean they can't be great in another area or can learn. I have (and had) a bunch of people on my teams that were/are not senior people but they have a smart brain on their shoulders, are inquisitive and learn. Sure they don't know our stack fully, they don't have the exact same opinion on how to write code etc. but they are able to learn and adjust and maybe teach us where our customs aren't the best as well. And we teach them too.

I'm speaking of practices like at large banks where people have been hiding doing nothing but being on Facebook all day for 10 years and all that has happened is that every project manager tries to avoid getting these people assigned to their projects.

Re: Individuals Matter

#80

Post by PragmaticPulp »

throwawaygh wrote: post #50
908B64B197 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can literally destroy small companies if an individual's unique contribution isn't properly understood and valued. It's generally cheaper to poach engineers than to buy a company. Just food for thoughts.

Is this really true for small companies? A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. It's hard to find numbers for the value of small software businesses (OP's quote), but this article [1] puts the number at $667k. If that's true, the engineer is…

> A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts.

Those discounts are why it's easier to poach the employees.

If a company has 10 engineers earning $200K/year, why would you buy the company for $667K per person and then pay the employees on top of that?

Just offer the employees $500K/year and they'll stream right over.

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