The problem with being a top performer (2017) | Hacker News Reader

The problem with being a top performer (2017)

scientificamerican.com

61 pointsderekp743 comments

> The results showed that star performers triggered different reactions from their peers depending on the resources available to the team. If resources were limited, peers felt threatened by and competitive toward high performers and thus undermined them. If resources were shared, peers benefitted from working with a star and thus socially supported the high performer.

Germany is known for being a nation of high performers, and also for being a country known for collective reward/punishment. Could that be related?

This was the key line that stood out to me as well. I've seen both situations where individuals are jealous of successful people in resource-limited environments and where employees appreciate working with and helping high performers when resources are plentiful for everyone.

You kinda need a middle ground, because failing to compensate for performance can lead to resentment, and undermine your top talent just as much as jealous coworkers.

In essence, it depends on what you mean by "resources" and what you mean by "plentiful for everyone".

I am intrigued by the seemingly counterintuitive notion that organizations could best encourage effective individual performance by rewarding team performance.

Knowing I'm going to let other people down is a lot more motivating to me than knowing I'm going to let myself down. I don't know how common this thought pattern is.

It's the oft-forgotten detail from the original "10x developer" study - it had a whole lot more about importance of teamwork

> seemingly counterintuitive notion that organizations could best encourage effective individual performance by rewarding team performance

This works in both directions, unfortunately & almost always accelerates your current direction.

If the team is starting to fall behind, the employees who are the high end of the scale start to lose motivation or develop resentment towards those who are not pulling their weight.

Rational decisions can sometimes be the wrong one in a prisoner's dilemma.

i think one other idea, is that you want a team to function as a team, and not necessarily a group of "individual contractors" (who are in it only for themselves) as it were...

when they feel motivated (and also helped) by those around them, thier individual contribution is buyuoed and multiplied by those teammates (feeling of belonging, trust and camaraderie, can be huge boosters of individual output)

(at least this is my experience, you mileage may of course vary)

Isn't this the genius of capitalism? If your coworker makes a billion dollar product all on their own, you're less likely to become resentful because you own stock in the company and will therefore cash out on the reward.

Collective ownership is an feature of capitalism?

There's this thing called equity that is distributed to co-founders and early employees of startups that serves as a form of collective ownership of the net assets and future profits, as well as decision making of the company. It's great! Genius even. This would be a good thing to read up on!

Genius, yes I agree. But capitalism doesn't deserves the credit for coming to understand the value of worker ownership.

If you really think that's genius, might I introduce you to socialism? Same idea but applied more broadly than to just the early employees at startups!

You might have mixed up whose call was "to own the means of production"

In Germany, being a high-performer also is rather a stigma...

A top engineer from a top university will barely make more net income than an assembly line worker at the same automotive company in Germany (it’s bit of an exaggeration but not much).

Germany has a very strong “support those that do not perform and make everybody believe that people create equal value”-mentality.

Unless you join a company that has incentive systems in place that reward high-performers (e.g., american companies tend to favor that with their subsidiaries) there is indeed a “regression to mediocracy”. Considering that the average household-income is surprisingly low in Germany (much lower than Austria or Switzerland) this might explain the high productivity.

I am sorry if I sound sarcastic or a bit cynical - but it took me well to my 30s to understand that a large portion of productivity stems from a small fraction of high performing individuals; and it was even harder to overcome the feeling of guilt and shame to actually get compensated for that.

A 10x software engineer making 150k p.a.: outrageous, tax the rich! A soccer player making 50 mio: well, he IS the best, right?

I would like to see an engineer produce much of any value without a line worker..

The thing about soccer players has got little to nothing to do with their playing abilities. It has more to do with them having the leverage to capture a greater portion of advertising revenue. They are visible, individual, rare and hence difficult to replace.

The idea that you get (or should get) compensated for your performance is laubable, but sadly not how the world works. I don't think anyone actually gets paid according to their input, ability or results. Their ability to get compensated is only very tangentially related to their performance (through how well they leverage the perception of their performance, or their rarity, or distinction from other potential workers).

People get compensated for the degree of influence they exert over their employer / the potential value they bring to the table.

That is the same for soccer player, only: they are more talented and sought after than you or me.

“What would engineers get done without assembly line workers” - well, for starters, let me give you a bit of an update how the world is now working for the young generation in Germany: - Your Dad or uncle works at Adi or BW and is a union member: great! There is a field in the application that specifically asks whether you have family members and to list them. Assembly line unions for traditional reasons exert an insane amount of power over the companies in Germany - that means: they just dictate that the salary of an assembly line worker is just insane; that no workforce reductions (automation anyone?) are made; guess who gets the apprenticeship position at 16/17 because of his outstanding grades, abilities and well, his Dad is a local union representative... 2000 applications, 50 spots, be SURE that every single one has a family member backing them. Has nothing to do with performance...

Now, there isn’t exactly a similar union concept for engineers and those uni graduates probably take a greater deal of pride in finding a job than having their Dad harass HR.

So the funny fact is: you are right that the reason to be compensated based on your performance is laudable but unrealistic - but the ONLY times I found this to be completely off limits was with those “family relationship union assembly line workers”.

I don't know how this other point should factor in, but in software especially:

Unlike in other types of say, physical labor where a top performer is just a few (X) more productive than the average performer -- in software, a top performer can be orders of magnitude (10-100X) more productive / more creative than the average worker.

I don't know what exactly contributes to this (intangible knowledge turning into action much more concretely, ability to avoid important pitfalls much more capably, ability to demonstrate correctly much quicker, no dependency on physical action, etc), but I have observed this to be a phenomenon.

>> I don't know what exactly contributes to this

Proper mental models, tool mastery, love for hyperfocus, brutality of testing, passion for solving interesting, difficult problems, along with the proper work environment involving a proper problem.

The same could be said for Andrew Wiles' process of solving Fermat's Last Theorem, tho in a vastly different arena.

If I had to nail it down to a single characteristic, it would be obsessive tenacity in the pursuit of a high standard of craftsmanship. From that, all else comes with time.

> Unlike in other types of say, physical labor where a top performer is just a few (X) more productive than the average performer -- in software, a top performer can be orders of magnitude (10-100X) more productive / more creative than the average worker.

i don't buy that at all. 100x means that the person could do one day's worth of work that would then take five months for a "normal" engineer to accomplish the same work. that simply isn't realistic. there may be one off cases, but that's a possibility in any field, although you seem to claim otherwise.

and "orders of magnitude" implies a lot. 10x is one order of magnitude, and 100x (highly doubtful anyway) is just two orders of magnitude.

I don't believe in 100x engineers, but I've seen 0.1x engineers and some who probably go negative. There's a limit to how badly you can stock shelves, but a bad line of code can (and has) destroyed companies.

I would like to call out bs on premise where in physical labor one cannot be orders of magnitude more productive than the average worker. That somehow only in software it is possible.

Playing football, what is so hard about it, you just run and kick the ball right? Then why some players are orders of magnitude better than the others?

Even stocking shelves can be optimized if you would like, I bet I could stock shelves after some optimization 10x or 100x faster than average workers. (as a student I was working stacking shelves)

Football players are already compensated on a vastly unequal scale, much more than software, since the difference between a messi and a b league player might be more than anywhere found in programmers. Also football is a creative labor, as every moment poses a problem which is unique, and you have to solve it in real time.

If you or anyone can stock shelves 100x faster, and the skill wasn’t copiable easily, they would for sure earn a lot more than the average worker. Hell, they can patent it and earn royalties.

One has to wonder how many of the 'high' performers (especially in software industry) are just people extremely good at drawing visibility to their work vs their peers who might not be having such 'skills'.

It is true of a lot of industries and realms. Even recruiting in athletics, which one would think is easier to quantify, is a lot of (self)-promotion.

It's an interesting point. I've met many developers who might be great at what they do, but like to focus on the tech itself (e.g. spending a lot of hours on improving infrastructure or fixing code style), so there's little appreciation from the business owners that don't understand how their work helps earn more money for the business, but at least they feel like they're doing their work the "correct" way.

The highest performing and most effective individuals on my teams (5x-10x) are constantly hiding and downplaying their achievements.

A sign for a 5x-10xEr is “yeah, that was easy, I just used some OpenSource, wrote a some scripts and integrated it; not worth to mention” vs the “I build everything from scratch because I believe we have a very unique need and I can do better than everybody else”

People I consider 5x-10xer find very elegant solutions to very hard problems and are more often than not embarrassed about how little effort was required and constantly downplay it.

I had mixed feelings about this piece for reasons related to what you're mentioning. I've been the target of this sort of thing at points in my life, being the high performer I suppose, but have also seen the converse of it.

I imagine this varies by field, but I notice two counterpoints to the perspective in the piece:

First, in my field there is a ton of corruption and lack of integrity. Glimpses into this appear in places like HN, but even then coverage seem to excuse the corruption away in Machiavellian ways I find infuriating. I know I have benefited from this corruption even when I'm trying to avoid it, but I see it all the time. Most importantly, it seems the likelihood of corruption increases exponentially with the level of "performance" in the field, so that the difference between someone performing highly versus very highly is often due to corruption or sociopolitical whims.

Second, even when there probably are genuine differences in performance, it's often very small, but the compensation gets magnified 10x. So, for example, the difference between the highest performer and the next highest performer might be small in an absolute practical sense, but the highest performer might see their salary increased significantly, while the next highest sees their salary frozen.

In either of these cases, the inequity is very real. If these researchers came in and studied my field, what they'd really be picking up on is justified resentment.

If you generalize this to society at large I think there are significant implications. Inequality is a major problem in many places, and I strongly believe the extent of it is unwarranted in general.

I view the research in the article with extreme skepticism because it is incredibly naive. It seems to assume that all (or most of) the metrics of performance are valid, are warranted, and that everyone attains status on those metrics in ethical, morally defensible ways, or that their status on those metrics reflects themselves rather than the output of a complex, quasi-random system of social inputs.

It's one of the inherent challenges of a democracy. When everybody has a chance at participating and making riches through hard work, people hyper-value achievenent and wealth. Contrast this with a feudal society, where the landed gentry and the serfs are less focused on wealth - because things are settled and people are more or less content.

Top performers in democracies can be resented because their achievement creates envy and shame within those that had that same opportunity, but have either squandered it through laziness or have been unlucky. Also, because members of a democracy share a common value of equality, signs of exceptionalism can often be perceived by the majority as discordant - especially if the individual shows no humility and deferrence to the majority.

These are not my ideas - but what the French philosopher de Tocqueville found when he travelled to the US in the early 1830's to study democracy - which he wrote about in 'Democracy in America'

The article does not address the crude ways we usually have of measuring what a top performer is. I believe our age will be remembered as the one where we said "everything measured gets improved" and proceeded to put in place shitty, half baked metrics on everything.

The problems at work often comes down to moral: when a low performer is honest about his performance, he's happy to follow the lead of a higher performer person. Whenever I see a moral issue with a person in any part of my life, I run away as fast as I can.

Do you mean 'morale', or 'moral'?

I'm not sure why you would run away from someone who's going through a low morale patch, we all get them. Seems like it would be the mark of a shallow individual to just abandon people.

I meant moral/ethical values. I abadon people who lie to me or to other people. I'm sorry if I didn't express myself correctly, I'm not a native English speaker.

Thanks for the clarification, I wasn't successful in reading your original comment that way.

In my experience, sometimes you have to lie because being sometimes situations arise where being honest hurts my immediate credibility which ultimately can hurt our relationship.

Lying to me is a tool that has to be used effectively. It's a fine line where if you do it too little, people think of you as a tool or you hurt yourself. If you do it a lot, nobody trusts you. It's a socially something that should be expected, but something for you to consider to yourself.

fwiw I think that a single letter probably would’ve your original comment clearer, specifically pluralizing the first instance of “moral”:

> The problems at work often comes down to morals

It is relatively uncommon to use the singular moral in a sentence, in my experience. You can maybe remember this by associating it with the idea that people have a set of morals, not just one.

The emissions test study is interesting to me because in college I had a shitty car that overheated during inspection. The inspector seemed to go out of his way to help (fiddling with the radiator) and the inspection passed.

Are top performers team players? If you are a top performer who always gets the juicy assignments then that's to the detriment to the growth of other people. But there are only so many top performers in many organizations. Just like when the top performer at high school goes to college and finds they're no better than average there, top performers are some mediocre companies will be put on performance plans at Google.

I've experienced this first hand when I was a know nothing try hard at a office job that didn't matter.

I learned fast to document.EVERYTHING!

Not that management can always have your back, but they most certainly will turn a blind eye when someone bitches or complains.

Sometimes HN is the mirror that we hold up to our own faces.

Software development wise, how this whole thing tie into Brooks' Mythical Man-Month "Surgery" approach?

Has that been attempted outside of Harlan Mills’ lab?

There's related study work mentioned in Peopleware when they were testing for signs of low and high performing organizations, including a lot on "10x developer" and how the team is more important (because it's also the team that helps high-performers reach the high performance).

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