Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrTonyD | Hacker News Reader

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The observation about getting C players to do the work is part of the actual strategy for succeeding in their market. The idea is that there are C players who are supported by B players who are supported by A players at HQ so that when things aren't going well the problems are escalated in order to either make the account go well or fix it after something has gone wrong. It is a model that actually works - though it can be a rocky path sometimes.

If you hire an independent A player as a consultant instead, they have no big organization with the resources of IBM. I've competed with IBM, and the saying of "you don't get fired for choosing IBM" is still more true for them than for anyone else.

IBM can still bring a level of competency which far exceeds anything Red Hat alone can do. Several well-known and successful companies where I've worked considered their biggest competitor to be IBM - though they didn't say that publicly since they didn't want to further legitimize the competition. They were already losing too many sales to IBM.

I worked for an independent team of A players (that ended up being bought by a D player company), and it was pulling teeth to get deals. We were better, everyone knew we were better that ever spoke to any of us, and them.

But none of that mattered. All that ever mattered was the CIO, and what company he wanted. Then he would write up a rule system where X company had to meet Y requirements that only his preferred company could meet.

We still got more work than we could handle, but people always want A players on the ground, but even at the exact same cost, the upper level management are going to make decisions based on things that have nothing to do with success.

> The idea is that there are C players who are supported by B players who are supported by A players at HQ

I agree it's a strategy, just not a very good one IMHO. I'd prefer to see A players at all levels, just at different levels of their career. Junior level A players can still contribute.

Your assumption is that a company with 300,000 employees would be able to only hire A players. The larger the company, the more it will naturally HAVE to trend towards average. Most successful large companies are successful because they know how to organize their company so that average employees are productive.

I'd be surprised if you could find enough A players to staff the model at the present payscale. Sure, you can argue that a more successful entity can generate more profits, but there's diminishing returns to that effect. Furthermore, there's going to be a lot of egos in the room if all you have are A players, and that's not necessarily sustainable in the long term, either.

A more successful entirely does not generate more profit in consulting body shops. The only thing that generate more profit is more consultants billed for more hours.

Sell quantity, not quality.

You still hear the old adage “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM” in many large enterprise software sales negotiations, even if the veracity of this statement is increasingly dubious in 2018.

And likely there are many counterexamples proving that people do get fired for choosing IBM but companies and governments typically do not go out of their way to advertise their failures.

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