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Comment by georgeecollins | Hacker News Reader

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 of goals would have performed better.

*I have seen people recommended because they worked at "X" or worked on the "X" project, and then turn out to be completely underwhelming. Great teams don't always only have great people, and sometimes the great team has people on it who are one promotion away being at their level of incompetence.

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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 didn't have a box under which to put them (or didn't have the right budget item to fit them in), and the team was dissolved.

The guys were good in the teams they each landed in, but the synergy[1] was dead.

Nowadays, my primary criteria for joining a team is the quality of the people and of the manager. I wish I could say I've seen other teams of the quality of that first one.

[1] yeah I said it

What's your criteria to measure "quality of the people", in this context?

Can I communicate with them well? (which is a huge topic in itself) Are the people I talked to focused and flexible? (this is not a contradiction) Do the team members refer to each other, and if so, in positive terms? Are the people interesting and curious?...

thats ok, its still a real world and a real thing if its used in a meaningful context

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.

You can't measure it before you join, just as they can't measure your effectiveness before you join. The best you can do is hit the eject button after 6 months after you've assessed what's really going on. Same goes for the employer's side.

> You can't measure it before you join

You can generate heuristic data though. This really should be a priority for you during the interview process. They have the right to ask you very difficult questions, and you have the right to ask them very difficult questions as well.

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.

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 like an office superhero that I liked more but I was really young so probably equal parts both.

Are you still doing consulting? I find that the upside of consulting is that there is a well defined finish line before you are deployed.

When you land in a role that has no finish line, it kind of removes the benefit of being a consultant.

Not really. I moved more into product work but I have one existing contract still going for a few hours a week. No finish line but it's a steady income stream and minimal hours so I've not minded it. It helps that the client is fantastic.

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), and the result was usually objectively measurable, e.g., the global search now completes in 1/50th of the previous time.

That said, when I reflect on the 10 or so projects I helped in this time, they were all problems the senior dev(s) on the team could have figured out. So, it wasn't really that I was some rockstar who had special knowledge. It was more that I was given time to focus on the issues, while the regular devs on the team had bugs to fix, features to work on, etc.

Like you, I now work for myself, but if I were offered a job doing small-medium performance optimization projects (without travel), that would be tempting.

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)

But, that's leveraging A talent across an entire organization. Why pay for 2-3x for all A players(that are going to piss all over each other anyway) across the entire org when you could with 1/2 hr of help a day use a bunch of B and C players. and save a lot of money.

That reminds me of a (proably apocryphal) story regarding IBM's "Black Team" [0]:

> The individuals who made up the team were not exceptionally intelligent or talented, but they all enjoyed testing software and were better than average at it. When these like minded individuals were assembled, they they spent their working hours, lunches and sometimes free time collaborating on how to better find software defects.

> Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2472219

No worries. It was a reasonable deployment.

> Nowadays, my primary criteria for joining a team is the quality of the people and of the manager.

That's mine too, but nowadays teams and especially managers last about 6 months in one place. What is one supposed to do?

Yes, people really need a well-organized environment to thrive, and the environment needs to be tolerant of humanity.

You can build a supercluster of massive computers, but if the coordinators are not able to map good tasks onto the appropriate resource or reduce the output into something coherent and comprehensible, your cluster is going to be sitting at 99.9999% idle time.

And just as you can't stick supercomputers exposed to the elements in the Mojave with a 3G connection and expect them to last more than a few more minutes without crashing, you can't stick good coders in an environment that's not conducive to their group and individual welfare and expect them to do anything except crash.

Humans have much less consistent performance output than machines, no matter how "10x" people think you are. They are even more sensitive to their environments than delicate computing devices. They require a lot of coordination and organization to output something useful.

Everyone ebbs and flows. Focusing on productivity multipliers usually ends in disaster. In most cases, today's raw skill is much less important than a realistic, productive worldview.

This extends beyond hiring. For example, selecting a spouse based on present qualities is much less intelligent than selecting a spouse based on their attitude and worldview and the changes that worldview is likely to precipitate, regardless of the current state.

Ahhh sure very nice...of course a "meta-selecting" system would almost surely outperform over time, but my experience seems to tell me that employers aren't really into "ebb-and-flow" productivity...they want consistency and dependable "X done in y time" workers.

I got a good perspective on this from little league coaching.

Sometimes that "superstar" kid is individually talented, but a net-negative on the team if the kid is a ball hog or doesn't share.

Coaching gives you a great perspective on team building. I'm still a novice coach, but my main goal with a new team is to get them to think like a team: it's not about the individual, it's about furthering the team's goal. Last game a really great hitter on the team had the opportunity to win it in the last inning: tie score, we had the last bats, no extra innings, and a runner in scoring position. With a simple ground ball, she could have driven in the run. Instead she went down swinging for a home run. That tells me I have a ways to go in developing her sense of team.

NOTE: We did win when the next batter came up and got the hit we needed.

yes! coaching helps you become a better team member, and you better understand the need for meshing personalities and having the right blend of specialties, not just stars. in basketball, i like to emphasize passing, moving without the ball, and help-and-recover defense, which are crucial skills to winning, but are often neglected at the expense of individual offensive skills. there are parallel sorts of skills in product development--you don't just need features, but also testing, documentation, visual design, analytics, etc.

i recommend coaching heartily. just don't get overly invested in winning (it's an important goal, but it's not everything).

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.

Goalies are the highest paid players in hockey? Interesting.

They're out on the ice the entire game, and usually the only person on the team that can play that position at any acceptable level. That on top of goalies being your last line of defense, having to take 25-35 shots per game.

The same reason your team fights a lot when the other team messes with your goalie; can't afford an injured goalie.

I'm not a fan of hockey, so I'm asking this question out of pure curiosity and ignorance. I'm assuming advanced analytics have made their way to hockey. Have the analytics supported this?

No, not really. Top-line centers are usually the most valuable player on a team, followed by other scoring forwards. Scoring is a premium in the NHL, which means that a very good scorer is harder to replace than a good defensive player, all else equal.

http://www.thehockeynews.com/news/article/new-war-stat-for-h...

No, this is not true. The top paid players in professional hockey are almost all high-scoring forwards.

4 of the top 50 highest paid players in the NHL are goalies.

I didn't do my research there, sorry.

You hear a lot about how a good goalie is half the team in modern hockey, so I thought that would translate to salaries.

Anyway, I hope I made my bigger point clear, despite the questionable example.

On the other hand, a star quarterback or goalie has a disproportionate positive effect on the team's winning chances, and chances to win championships.

Sure.

But even great quarterbacks struggle if the O-line is dysfunctional.

And you definitely wouldn't be better off with 6 star quarterbacks than 1 average quarterback and 5 O-line players.

This is probably true of a quarterback, but it's not generally true of hockey goalies. You'd much rather build your team around Sidney Crosby than any goalie to ever play the game.

Ok, fair enough! Though, has anyone ever analyzed this question rigorously with data? I.e. is there a Bill James equivalent in the ice hockey world?

The larger point is that individual stars definitely matter a lot in pro sports. And recruiting and retaining them with extremely disproportionate amounts of money doesn't seem to be irrational for most sports.

Look into Corsi and Fenwick.

See my link to an attempt at a hockey WAR (wins above replacement) elsewhere in this thread.

That's not true. You can take a look at the Rangers right now, whose only true "superstar" is the goalie- Lundqvist.

OK, but that's my claim. My claim is that you'd still rather have Crosby, because there's a much bigger talent gap between him and his hypothetical league-average replacement at center than between Lundqvist and a league-average goalie.

Obviously I meant to say that's not my claim :)

With exceedingly diminishing returns.

That's an argument for snatching up one of these people per team, but not an entire team of them. The analogy being made I believe is that there's simply no benefit to having two or three quarterbacks on a single football team. It doesn't even make sense.

Well the US Olympic Basketball Dream Team did crush it.

Even that team was fielded based on position. They didn't have 12 centers.

They didn't have 12 Cs [0], but can you think of any absolute snubs? The team only had 1 true center and 1 true PG.

Isiah Thomas was deserving, and Laettner was picked over Shaq. At the time, both were tossups. Johnson was older and so was Bird, but I assume they had high salaries per the topic.

[0] http://www.basketball-reference.com/olympics/teams/USA/1992/

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

I'd imagine the majority of sports have a fairly loose correlation between money spent and winning due to (a) limited sample size leading to high variance (even with a superior player selection strategy), (b) limited number of games played (though baseball does better than other sports here), and (c) games consisting of more dependent than independent events (leading to low chance events having cascading repurcussions).

At least in MLB, 40 multi-year players isn't that large a sample!

I don't disagree, but I also don't think that's indicative that paying the most money is the optimal strategy. I'd much rather play for a team that does win rather than one that "should" but doesn't. My point, which I alluded to in the last paragraph, was not that teams shouldn't spend a lot of money, but that spending a lot of money is not a good substitute for spending money intelligently.

I can't speak for the New York Yankees, but the 'Galacticos' policy of Fiorentino Perez, where Real Madrid would try to sign one expensive, world-famous footballer every year, is widely considered to have been a failure despite initial success - partly because of a lack of interest in signing defensive players (they didn't want to pay Makelele's salary despite it being relatively low), locker room egos, and constant interference from the Club President over hiring.

To throw another example on the list, the New England Patriots are 30/33 for salary money spent. The Miami Dolphins are 5th. Spending big money for rockstars is neither necessary nor sufficient.

http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/look-nflpa-salary-cap-char...

Sports is a terrible analogy for work. A sport is a game with rules that are created to create an entertaining event. The rules are defined. The outcomes are always instances that never build to a lasting change to the structures that created the outcome. Work is not like that in any way.

I do like the Belbin Team Inventory as a way of looking at team dynamics I was Plant Chair Shaper when I took it a few years ago,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Role_Inventories

I'm in complete agreement, but to add to the thought of "Hire the best..." as lazy, I think it's just incorrect.

The best what? If you're talking about a software development team, are you hiring the best software developers? The best devs in what niche? I consider myself a very good developer, but I would be shit for quite a while if I joined a team focusing on embedded systems. Or if I was writing an OS kernel. I would likely get up to speed and surpass some people, but I may never be as good at Y as I am at A, B, and C now. I may just not have the passion for it that I do for those other things.

To agree with your point more, assembling a team of 'rockstars' who are all good at just about the same things means that your team is likely going to have very large blind spots (say: testing, for instance), and contention over people's preferences for work. We can't all be the architect of a greenfield real time data processing service.

I fundamentally believe someone who is engaged, enjoys critical thinking, likes to learn, and is generally good (or at the very least conscientious) at their craft can move from technology stack to technology stack if it aligns with their personal interests and/or motivations. I do, however, believe we generally have our sweet spots where we are most apt. Maybe due to our preferences, possibly our aptitude, likely a combination of those and our personal preferences.

I consider myself stack agnostic, I float between a half dozen languages a month between professional and personal projects and depending on the problem trying to be solved. But if I sat down and thought about it, a couple of languages would float to the top as my preferred or best, and the rest would be because I'm good at solving a certain type of problem with them.

We can't all be the best at everything, but we can be really damn good at some, and together we can go full Voltron and kick ass. It's just too hard for someone in HR/Talent Acquisition to figure out who should be the leg or the arm (or even what Voltron is), and they're likely the filter most candidates must get through.

EDIT: To add, I'm not just ragging on HR/Recruiters either. I generally know what I'm looking for in developers but still consider it hard to interview and hire. I don't think I'm very good at being the interviewer in the formal interview process. Now, if we had all the time in the world and left the office to grab a pint and just talked like human beings I think I could feel it out better, but now I can't get any work done and I'm going to be drinking 5 days a week until I fill the position.

>I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star".

Yes, it's very important to realize that this is how people think; most of our decisions are subconscious, and the frame/bias that informs everything else about our perception is determined rapidly, within seconds of evaluating a situation or becoming acquainted.

If you bear the tokens of success (i.e., if you "look" successful), people will assume that means you know what you are doing, and if you don't, people will assume you don't. There is a pronounced halo effect on association. Anchor yourself against something generally considered successful and your perceived intelligence will go up precipitously.

Entrepreneurs especially need to take this lesson to heart. You will be a daydreamer and a slacker who can't handle having a boss right up until your company appears successful, and then you'll be a visionary that everyone is falling over themselves to try to imitate.

But but...then what will the MBAs and C-suites do if they can't stack rank and yank people, saving some $$ and getting their own promotions?

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