The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008) | Hacker News Reader

The Wetware Crisis: the Dead Sea effect (2008)

brucefwebster.com

127 pointsdwmkerr127 comments

These things always have a grain of truth to them, in that they describe some places some of the time, but I also think there's so many things going on in any given place it's hard to generalize.

A well-run organization will hire the right people, and then foster their development in such a way that they are productive, happy, and grow, and will compensate them sufficiently. If any of those things break down, you can run into any number of problems, and they won't necessarily take the form that seems obvious at first.

I've seen organizations take very competent people and ruin their morale and shunt them into projects that were really detrimental to them getting out, in ways that aren't obvious at the time. Or weird organizational dynamics cause changes over time that make someone look bad in ways that aren't their own fault.

There's just weird things that happen that don't simplify to simple models of "talent that is completely independent of environment and perfectly visible."

Have you ever personally had a long term career in a corporation that somehow managed the escape velocity to actually become something other than typical? i.e. typically toxic and bound to these laws?

I work for myself, but I have quite a few friends who have worked for large companies for 10-20 years.

Some companies just know how to treat their employees well, and they benefit from that.

Yes but only due to near 100% turnover of management and toxic coworkers in a short amount of time. It was weird the day I realized I was essentially working at a different job.

What? You think all employees will inevitably hate working at every company if they stay awhile?

There are no great companies left and everyone of any worth evaporates and ends up "working for themselves" and employee mentality has made most corporations into dystopian surveillance states where management rules by force of mediocrity so the ones that stay are happy to wallow in their entitlements as long as they're free to dress in rags and can afford their mortgage payments yea

Your view on this is far more negative than average. There are plenty of people who have been working at companies for a long time and are content there.

Hey CydeWeys my good fellow I appreciate your opinion very much and I'll tell you why I'm cynical

Maybe there are a few epic companies but for 80% of devs at a guess they'll grow up grow old and grow decrepit in an open concept office reeking of pizza and microwave popcorn surrounded by a bunch of distressed disrespectful and discounted directors and managers treating them like cannibalistic humanoid underground developers while preparing them to be eaten by the machine like a rabid pack of Morlocks

I wasn't put on this earth to be turned into Soylent Green for a feature factory that chews up people and spits out machine code and Alan Turing sure as hell didn't give his life so we could wear house shoes to the office

Compared to what we're missing out on the free granola tastes like bitter bile and all ever managed to do was get drunk on great quality booze I'll admit and barf up artisanal pizza and salads

Out of interest, which companies do you think were great?

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, the Medici, Nintendo and Apple in the early days, a lot of Canadian and probably American banks in the sixties and seventies and eighties.. Airlines before the economy model.. Lots of iconic hotels and restaurants, Ma Bell.. all kinds of companies have been great it's just that as people we think we're above it all somehow and our attitudes have brought us to a point where it's understood we're only trading time for money and we're selling ourselves short at every turn and all our corporations are merging into one megalocorp where it's just mediocrity and toxicity and even this forum is nothing but an echo chamber of the neurosis

Another problem is that CEO's don't understand what they're really in it for -- they're not in it for the mind state that comes with being a leader but only for the profits they can extract from the bargain it's obvious by their actions and their dress

In short a company that has high alignment and high autonomy the two are not mutually exclusive and indeed form the basis of what I'd call the American Way

So, a fictional company, a family before capitalism was conceived, two startups that made it big but before they became big, and pretty much everything else defined by nostalgia for a time during which your fictional company was supposed to have existed.

I agree that the current crop of MBA CEOs are detrimental as a whole.

Perhaps it's just starting off with a fictional company but this really reminds me of someone being asked to list heroes and naming John McClane and the guy who said Nuts to the Nazis at the Battle of the Bulge. Which I got to give props to the second guy of course, but it feels like the viewpoint is limited and not securely tied to reality.

To give another fantastical yet limited viewpoint, the extremely short period of time in human history where

A) large scale production and innovation were required

B) but globalization hadn't arrived so there was an extreme lack of supply of educated and experienced individuals to deliver the objectives of A

Produced a lot of "great" companies in the sense that they offered for both labor and knowledge workers good jobs with upward mobility, and a strong sense of self-identity and orderly progress.

As soon as point A was subsumed by corporatism (patent and copyright wars, debt servicing) and B faded away (so labor lost its seat at the table) companies have become "commoditized" - there's absolutely zero point in establishing or aboding by a corporate identity today when you may have new masters tomorrow.

Nintendo's early days were in the nineteenth century (1890's, if I'm not mistaken). Not quite a startup.

thanks, I didn't know that.

Touché my dude! I'm trying to describe companies that were hardcore about branding and would retain people aggressively under penalty of death for dishonor

Look it may be idealized but what makes us think that we can grow complacent all of a sudden what happened to the cold war and the arms race?

Just because we declared peace and came from a generation of acid heads doesn't mean that we're not operating in a war zone

The most dangerous weapon is intelligence and intelligence operative is another word for knowledge worker

It reminds me of the Gervais Principle https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

> Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce

What?

A fictional advertising firm from the television series "Mad Men." A "great" place for heterosexual men in suits to work, a not-so-great place for anyone else.

I suspect the average person would actually find that a much worse place to work than most modern white collar companies. You wouldn't want those main characters as your boss, especially not if you're a woman.

What irks me the most is the current crop of so called white collar is populated by people who don't have a fraction of the dress sense and don't even wear white collars or when they do it's combined with something preposterous like a fleece vest or puffer jacket

I have witnessed a vice president at a danged top five bank in Canada dressing like he was going clubbing

The 1960s are long past, thank god, and we have a lot more personal freedom than workers did back then. If you wanna wear a suit, be my guest, but I’m going to stick with t shirts and my weird toe shoes. They’re more comfortable.

I wear toe shoes and a tailored shirt bro

You're acting like the t shirt is the pinnacle of shirt technology it's literally two tubes of flimsy fabric aren't you even a little ashamed of your bare arms after all these years? Do you like that feeling of leaning in close and rubbing arm hair with your neighbour? Ever consider that bare arms might be rude on some level naw you likes what you likes I guess we should be grateful you wear toe socks most days

By the way you have zero freedom -- these companies are eating you from every angle and you're taking it on the chin

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2016/07/07/...

^^ contributing to falling standards since '97

I’m not ashamed of my bare arms, no. What a strange suggestion.

For most Canadian financial institutions, does 'Vice President' mean anything more than someone who works in b2b sales? They seem to be a dime a dozen.

It would nearly as bad as Google's C suite!

I'm well aware of what it is. it's just - if your example of a 'great company' is a fake company that is also intentionally terrible... what?

Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is the name of a fictional advertising agency in the TV series "Mad Men", in case anyone is confused by this confusion

So much this. Thank you. I've never heard it put more succinctly.

Well there's a lot to it -- we've been duped into thinking our work is a service when it's really an investment

Once we've been paid a generous pittance we're divorced from the fruits of our labour which are then flipped into astronomic profits while we continue to slave over features and slowly suffocate in meeting rooms similar to interrogation chambers

If we actually had ownership and took our rightful due we'd be far better off

The difficult part is that academia doesn't prepare us for these realities and let's face it the whole curriculum is a joke compared to real world professional activities

It's just that every year there's a new crop of naive youngsters willing to sign their rights away for the privilege of coming in wearing a hoodie and sweatpants

How to stop that though? You'd basically have to include contract law as a gen ed or primary education course. Or some sort of, "Business/Professional Survival" course. Which then runs you into the problem of, who curated a truly representative sample of how businesses operate, and what their rhetorical agenda is in terms of what image or philosophy of business they fancy.

I mean, I was in FBLA for a while, and it did zilch for communicating what the realities of modern business were.

No, but they will eventually become overburdened with ever more rules, regulations, and lose the cohesive team which existed at the beginning.

I'm always going to cringe at Twitter's "star" engineers who spend an average of 7 months in each company. HTH do you even understand the product and contribute in that time frame? One of two things needs to be at play:

1. You were brought in to do very specific work (i.e.: migrate something to k8s).

2. You were brought in as a token due to your social media following.

Seriously, how else?

Haha, it typically takes 6 months to get up to speed at a company as everyone has their own set of unique tools and infrastructure. Also at that cadence you are not vesting any stock(1 year cliff?) so that seems very strange. Having worked with high-vis engineers in the past, alot of them seem to be vanity hires, they really don't impact much change and probably stoke the egos of the upper managers/execs much like (prof. slughorn from harry potter), collecting "geniuses".

If it takes 6 month to come to speed for an experienced engineer, I would say you are working with dinosaurs, in a jurassic age company.

In jurassic age companies you can get up to speed quicker, there is less to wrap your head around and the onsite staff tend to use a simpler approach (manual methods etc).

If you think you are "up to speed" on a large company a week or so you are usually so incompetent you don't know what you don't know.

You can be contributing code in a week or less, but if you're getting fully up to speed on any moderately large system in under 3 months, you probably should take breaks for meals and sleep more. Or you're not getting fully up to speed and are just ignorant. It could be less for a trivial or entirely greenfield system, but then you're worrying about other things like requirements/constraints/etc.

Unless you stick to a very niche domain that you know well, there will be a massive amount of new information to learn. It takes many months to absorb it all.

It depends on the domain. If it's something complicated it might take a while to figure out the business logic of the system, especially if it's something large like an enterprise system. Also, I think a better way of putting it is that it might take that long for them to have a net positive effect on the org. As in they are contributing with minimal help from the rest of the team.

Depends what you define as up to speed

if an engineer can't make impact until 6 months later is this engineer even worth hiring? Large organizations typically take longer time to ramp up, but regardless of size I expect to make impact at least to my team within the first month of hiring.

Sure it is easily possible to make impact in the first month of hiring, but this will most likely be the wrong kind of impact.

I know one like this and the truth is that he doesn’t bother.

He dramatically improves the processes and code which isn’t domain specific and just leaves the rest a mess.

Improve auth? Yes. Improve finance module? Yes. Build better APIs and SQL queries? Yes.

Fix the problems in the actuarial system for funerals? Nope. That’s when you leave and do it all over again.

They contribute to all the parts not specific to the product but common between many products.

I agree, this seems an extremely self-serving creed for "Twitter devs"

Other companies offer added benefits to retain their valuable talent.

The push among "social media stars" to declare long tenures as a negative is problematic, to say the least.

>1. You were brought in to do very specific work (i.e.: migrate something to k8s).

That's how most work gets broken down though. Just find an entry point and start reading code. Read docs, comments, find dependencies, figure out what needs to change in light of your change.

You shouldn't need deep product and tribal knowledge to make simple changes.

In most places you don't need deep product and tribal knowledge to make small changes. You need deep product an tribal knowledge to know what small change to make. Almost anyone new at a company will have someone else telling them what the first thing they need to do is, and that person is telling you to do something that wasn't important enough for them to do themselves.

For what it's worth, the best interns/juniors I've had started out making simple changes like this. I'd break down the work and parcel it out for them every day until they had accomplished something big. Then I'd start parceling it out less and less until they just knew what they were doing.

Is this really true? Do you have any sources for this? I'm interested in learning more.

As we are just transforming people quotations into laws and effects, let me add mine.

”In a heated market, where it is easier to crack code interviews than to prove yourself a talented and effective IT engineer, the least talented and effective engineers are more likely to leave, to float away, because their employers have less reason to try to keep them. Those who tend to remain are the ones who have more “weight” in the company, as their effectiveness and talent are better evaluated by their colleagues than external audience from conference talks, blog posts, and code interviews”

Soneca

You can call that ”The Gravity Effect”

I've heard this as one of the key justifications for an internship program. Outperformers are likely to be aggressively retained by their first employer, so if you want a fighting chance at landing them, that had better be you.

My general experience, at least in start-ups, has been the exact opposite. In a good company with great culture and good compensation, strong talent was usually in for the long haul, and those who don't find their place leave after a year or so.

In bad companies that's not true of course, so perhaps this can be a good measure of company quality - if their top talent are indeed good and are there for a long period of time, it's a very positive signal.

One example I can think of is Redis Labs - the core group of engineers have been with the company for almost a decade, and these guys are some of the nicest, most humble and most talented engineers I've ever met (And of course there's antirez who's in a league of his own).

I violently agree with you.

The most important thing you can do during a job interview is to as best you can figure out who the talented people are and how long they've been at the company. If the most talented people are the people who have been there the longest, it's a good sign. If the people who have been there the longest don't seem to do any technical work and seem like powerpoint monkeys, it's a dire warning sign that the company is deeply dysfunctional.

In any case, the "Dead Sea Effect" is not a general truth, it's only true in dysfunctional organizations. The author of the linked post seems to be a consultant who helps failing IT organizations turn the ship around. I think his experience has led him to self-select into the dysfunctional ones.

This makes sense.

A good company will appreciate talent, enable it, recognize any lack of it, and create some form of community. So it's a bad place to be a vampire, but a great place to be talented.

A bad company will fail to appreciate or enable talent, not notice vampires, and have no real community. Great place to clock in and get a paycheck, but not very fulfilling.

Talented people tend to be driven by interest at least enough that it's worth it to do things they're interested in.

One way we try to combat this is the way you get salary increases is mainly through promotions. Promotions are based on reasonably solid criteria and you can go up for promotion anytime you want (max every 3 months). Engineers senior to you determine whether or not you meet the criteria in a forum that is loosely based on a thesis defense. you answer questions and show your work and how it demonstrates the skills. People are either learning, executing, or teaching a skill.

People that dont get promoted get very few raises so are incentivized to leave.

The levels are essentially:

1) learning core skills under heavy supervision

2) ability to develop a feature with moderate supervision

3) ability to develop a product as it was envisioned, independently

4) ability to conceptualize a product, kick off a new product, and change direction in the middle if need be

5) ability conceptualize a portfolio of products and how they interface

6) ability to run a business unit of products

7) ability to start your own company (at this point we fund people to start their own company)

There are more detailed criteria around leadership, growing other people, contributing to recruiting, understanding, finance/accounting (P&L), following a solid methodology, contributing to the intellectual property of the company, improving the operations of the company, ability to deal with various level executives outside the company, exhibiting the values, being an expert in something etc

So who maintains the 'legacy code' aka the products your company actually makes money selling?

The ones who don't reach the next level

(This could explain why google has a hard time maintaining their old projects: Google on the resume is so so valuable that whoever doesn't rise within google leaves and gets a rise at another company.)

So the 'less good' developers provide the business value whilst the 'better' devs get promotions and more money?

I'd stay there for one year (less looks bad on a CV) get the 'promotions' and then move.

“So the 'less good' developers provide the business value whilst the 'better' devs get promotions and more money?“

That’s true in a lot of companies. Reliable people are kept in their positions to keep things going. Others get to do the new stuff and if that works out they look like superstars.

The “better” devs work on creating the things that will provide business value in the future and that require more skill/expertise to create.

Writing code for new products is easier than adding features to or making security updates to 'legacy' products without destroying them.

you can replace product with project and it would still apply.

There is some distinction between being able to kick off projects with existing products and kicking off a totally new product.

most people are working on kicking off updates to existing products.

I too think this depends on how dysfunctional the company is and in what way it is dysfunctional.

Overall, with reasonable management, people have better idea about your skills and abilities after working with you then shortly after interview. Interview is artificial short situation. If that applies, staying makes a lot of sense because you get more challenging tasks, more autonomy, your word is trusted, you have more say in negotiations. Leaving to another company means that you have to start again less trusted, won't get those challenging tasks and generally need to prove yourself before gaining the same back. Plus yoi risk that environment in new company will be more toxic. Changing team is in the middle - you have reputation and sometimes simply need change so that you don't stagnate.

In such organization, pure talkers loose credit over time, get moved from team to team and no one wants to keep them and end up on project they themselves don't want and nobody wants and leave.

Obviously, if the company starts to be dysfunctional over some treshold or stagnates, the high quality people will leave as the above benefits get lost. If it is toxic or unchallenging right now, you are good chance another company will be better.

> Fred Brooks and Jerry Weinberg pretty much nailed down all the essential issues in IT project and personnel management more than 30 years ago; yet, amazingly, the problems haven’t all gone away! There is a profound lack of professional and institutional memory in IT;

Brooks also used his analysis to give a solution -- which (AFAICT) nobody has ever implemented. The problem isn't lack of 'memory'. His ideas weren't adopted even when they were new. It's amazing that after 45 years we're still pointing to this book as a must-read which correctly explained the problems of our industry, yet managers universally ignore the chapters which explain what to do instead. I don't see that happening in other fields.

> almost everyone who writes about IT project/personnel management (myself included) is looking for new ways to cast or explain the core issues in a touching hope that maybe this time someone will actually listen and fix them.

Good luck with that. Brooks' book is sitting on every manager's desk in the world, and he couldn't get them to read and follow it. Another blog isn't going to help. Things are only going to change when the industry has a "come-to-Jesus moment" -- like if software starts killing people and the government steps in and says "hey maybe you should all be required to adopt NASA's methodologies".

There needs to be some sort of prerequisite to make this valid.

Having been through a number of downturns in my career, you do see really talented people leaving at the worst time possible for the business. But assuming that everyone who leaves is your best talent is not such a good thing to do.

The prerequisite is a lackluster/dysfunctional/toxic work environment, which is probably like 99% of jobs out there.

Is it though?

Right, it doesn't even need to be a bad environment. The situation might even be worse in a good environment.

Consider the team that has no dead weight at all. There is a normal talent distribution and everyone is productive.

Layoffs come around and the bottom 25% are let go. All that work needs to be distributed to the remaining developers. The best members of the team now have less time to work on the really hard, interesting problems because they have to pick up some of the boring work that still needs to be done. Some of them may leave because of this.

I've seen this happen.

Nothing like looking at truck numbers for things that you know how to do but hate doing to motivate you to find a new job. I've left twice when we hit 2, because I knew if we hit 1 I'd feel guilty about quitting, and then resentful about staying.

It's like a bad mix of Musical Chairs and Hot Potato where nobody wins.

Right. The old adage - if you smell shit all day, check your shoe - seems to apply. If you think virtually every organization is toxic, then the problem probably lies with you.

It’s a spectrum, but yes most companies do a terrible job at prioritizing the development and well being of their employees.

Ask your boss to take a week long course that will make you significantly more productive, paid for by the company. What is their answer? 9/10 employers (maybe even 99/100) would say no.

I mean, one of the top posts right this moment on HN is about how employers are recording every single keystroke of their WFH employees.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23165579

Sorry, my shoes are clean.

One of my unfinished goals from a few years ago was to interview some personal trainers to ask how they do it. How they show up over and over and listen to the same excuses from new faces. What's the trick? How do you do it?

"The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed." In a trade where fixing things is a job skill, knowing how to fix things that nobody wants to fix (yet) can be demotivating, even aggravating. Does that make one toxic, or can there be pervasive problems that takes your industry 20 years (epochs in software) to adopt?

So if you have high standards instead of being content with mediocrity, you.. have a problem? Well, that kind of thinking most certainly would encourage people who want and can do better to leave.

"This is crap" is, for a lot of people, a way to say that this is utterly mediocre (aka. not good, and not satisfying).

>So if you have high standards instead of being content with mediocrity, you.. have a problem?

The OP was questioning the assumption that the vast majority of workplaces are the kinds of toxic workplaces described by the article and some commenters. Not mere mediocrity.

The account in the article and in some of the more negative commenters didn't fit the experience of the person you replied to, and it doesn't fit mine either. From my (limited anecdotal and not universal) experience and the experiences of devs I know working in various fields, I've seen some toxic workplaces, but they weren't very common and stood out.

I recall talking to (generally younger more emotionally immature) folks who worked at places I've worked. We had good pay, really good benefits, we were on a friendly team with management keeping a light touch. I was happy. They focused on flaws, complained about things like ending free donuts on Fri as though they were living under tyranny, saw things as generally hellish, and were miserable. I've personally seen just what the OP was describing in others. It's worth recognizing that you do get out of things what you bring to them, since not recognizing it is a recipe for misery. If you think everything is toxic, chances are you're bringing something to the story that's causing that.

For people leaving in a downturn that is a reasonable assumption. If the employment market is bad, then mediocre employees have no good options to leave - they might try, but they won't find anything better; but really good techs will have opportunities in any market; well, at least they had in the last 'busts'.

I've seen plenty of people in IT with mediocre skills having no problem at all finding new jobs. I've also seen talented developers stay in the same place for a long time.

I'm much more willing to believe that the quality of engineers at an organisation has more to do with the organisation itself and the sector.

I've noticed that some people hold a grudge against mediocrity that I don't entertain, and yet they don't know what to do with belligerent incompetence and so they try not to think about it, whereas I can't stop thinking about it.

Overqualified people working on a project can produce some heinous code. What I want as a team lead is to know how far I can trust people with different tasks, figure out who can be stretched in what directions, make a stab at scheduling the work out to try to minmax that equation, course correct a few times, observe outcomes and root causes and try to put safety equipment or process in the places where things start to go wrong the most.

You can get a lot of important if boring work done by 'average' or 'below average' developers - as long as they don't suffer from Dunning-Kruger.

Performance is on a bell curve (and not static). If you're trying to run your project like you only have to deal with the top 20%, well guess what, you're still going to have a bell curve. If you're in charge of any strategy and you won't acknowledge this, then you are the biggest idiot in the room, and I don't want to hear your opinions on who the second biggest idiot is.

> Overqualified people working on a project can produce some heinous code

> You can get a lot of important if boring work done by 'average' or 'below average' developers

This is why google developed the go programming language - dumb enough that people can't build overly complex abstractions, but capable enough that average engineers can churn out productive work.

Here, I reversed it and it sounds about as believable to me:

> The "Anti Dead Sea Effect" suggests that in any organisation, the skills/talent/efficacy of engineers is often proportional to their time in the company.

> Typically, lowly skilled engineers find it easy to gain employment elsewhere and are the first to do so. Engineers who have obsolete or weak skills will tend to leave the company, as finding employment elsewhere is not difficult. This is particularly pronounced if they have not gained incremental pay rises over their time in the company, due to their poor skills, as it can be easier to fool someone else to pay them more.

The other side of the coin is salary compression and inversion.

That’s where HR policies dictate that no one will get more than slightly above cost of living raises no matter what while at the same time having to bring new employees in at market rates.

You find a situation where the more tenured employees are getting paid less than new employees with the same skillset but without the corporate understanding.

This varies enormously by the history of the company. I've seen situations where companies are quite stable and very happy to give tiny increases to manage their costs and don't care if they lose engineers because it's not like an individual engineer is actually going to make or break the company. This tends to be true at very large organisations with mature markets. These are the sort of companies that kind of know they aren't going to increase their revenue beyond a certain point so they're focused on reducing costs. A side effect is managers hire in at high salaries because they know the increases won't be big and you end up with a shuffle of slowly inflating everyone's job title. Suddenly you're hiring senior staff out of university.

On the flip side though I've also seen senior (long serving) staff massively overpaid, because they got massive bumper promotions and pay rises during growth periods for the company, and then when things tighten and growth slows, they're still sitting on very generous pay. Particularly in 2010-2015 where staff had got big increases in 2000-2007 but all the new staff had been hired during the recession.

That’s still a problem. When the company eventually has a change of direction and lays off the overpaid (for their marketable skillset) developers and then they have to go back out on the market and find that no one wants a 45 year old ASP.Net WebForms developer.

They will end up on HN complaining about “ageism” in the industry.

At 45 myself, I can’t afford to allow myself to get comfortable at a company that isn’t using technology that keeps me marketable. If I see that starting to happen it’s time to change jobs. I never want to be beholden to the shins of a single company for my livelihood.

I would much rather be able to depend on my marketable skillset, my updated resume, and my always warm network of former managers, coworkers, and local recruiters.

> Typically, lowly skilled engineers find it easy to gain employment elsewhere and are the first to do so

Not really.

I feel like that is a ridiculous generalization.

It can be true to a certain extent in that you may have _some_ engineers who aren't very good sticking around in some organizations. But why would you think that is the case for most of them? You might have engineers deciding to stay because they have a family and think their job is fine.

Or maybe for organizations that have poor leadership or existing engineers, that is the case that the good engineers realize that and leave. But for really good organizations, they are extremely selective in terms of recruiting and compensate employees highly, with difficult but rewarding work, it might be the opposite -- people who weren't really cut out for it are quickly eliminated.

For me personally I eventually came to the conclusion that there was no perfect job, and my plan for personal growth is not to flit from job to job anymore trying to get higher salaries, but rather to save and work on side projects to hopefully eventually have my own business. So for that strategy it doesn't make sense to keep switching jobs.

To all those people throwing doubt on this, you are highlighting a situation where there are a dozen downturns in a career. Better people last longer.

People who switch more often however ladder up on their skill sets. Taking a diverse number of approaches that change from place to place and adapting nicely to them all and maybe even bringing a few skills from elsewhere to help in their current job.

A comfortable job makes you stagnant. Movement is good. Even within company.

Or, as a former boss put it: "the problem with this place is that anyone with 'get up and go' has already got up and gone."

Come to think of it, he was gone too about a month later.

To provide some context on this, Bruce Webster worked mainly as a consultant that triaged projects that have missed their targets. Therefore, his definition of the "Dead Sea Effect" probably comes from his almost exclusive experience with failed projects and ineffective teams.

Source: He taught my software engineering class and this blog post was required reading. I think his "thermocline of truth"[1] is one of his more effective metaphors.

[1]: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-t...

This assumes that skill and efficacy don't come from domain specific/company specific experience.

You can be a lousy engineer, but if it is all your lousy code and you know it line by line, you will be a heck of a lot more effective than the star engineer who has been there for just a few months and hasn't learned the codebase yet.

I'm not sure that's true. I've seen incompetent engineers working away to maintain their own "house-of-cards" systems that break easily and take forever to change. Then within a matter of weeks a competent engineer comes in and replaces the whole ball of yarn with something that fast, clean, and doesn't break.

If you know what the house of cards is supposed to do, sure. If not, you can't easily replace it as then you are requirement generating again.

Most often I've seen this kind of thing done with software build pipelines where most competent engineers already have an understanding of the requirements, but this can be seen in other systems as well.

The point of these house of cards systems is that there is far more incidental complexity than there is essential complexity. The requirements are not enormously complex. The problem is that the incompetent engineer is only thinking tactically within the bounds of the system as it is currently implemented, they aren't thinking strategically about how the design could be improved to require much less work.

It's a cute anecdote, but I don't think it really illuminates enough or even thinks through the implications of its analogy.

Water evaporates out of the Dead Sea because there is somewhere better (in the sense of lower humidity at least) for it go.

If you treat people as evaporating and disappearing when they leave your company, you'll never have a clear picture if the dynamics at play. You need to think about where they are going and the relative difference between their current environment and the other one they escape too.

When the air holds enough humidity, it rains on the Dead Sea too sometimes.

In an ecological sense, the water level in the Dead Sea is dropping because Israel and Jordan siphon off too much water from the Jordan river for irrigation. By the time the river gets to the Dead Sea, the average flow rate is lower than average evaporation.

There is probably some metaphor in here for having a bad reputation decreasing your hiring funnel.

I think that's primarily true for companies that don't pay their engineers enough. The companies that pay a lot of money obviously don't have problems attracting and retaining talent.

Yeah, the reason some company might experience this effect is because the company is managed in a way that makes people want to leave as soon as they have a chance. The problem isn't the employees.

It's not even simply a matter of pay. Even companies that pay well often have a fair bit of churn.

What often matters is whether one is in a position to develop skills and enhance one's impact on the organization.

Anecdotally, I find the opposite to be true. Also part of being "effective" is having a large amount of system knowledge which you would build over a long time.

The problem with general advice. I would say most engineers take 1-2 years to truly grok the business, internal relationships and the whole of the technology stack you have deployed. So if you’re jumping ship every year or so like I sometimes see recommended you’re not really ever firing on all cylinders. Once you have the big picture and have deployed multiple projects - is when you can start proactively fixing systematic issues that you’ve identified

For engineers, is it ever really worth it to understand the business?

I can see the enormous harm having no technical people who know the domain causes in my current role, but the benefits of learning it seem to be slim to none for the individual engineer. The harm is in low productivity for my employer, but they don't seem to care about retention anyway. Most do not.

A good engineer who understands the business thoroughly is I'd wager 3 times more valuable than just a good engineer who has no knowledge of the business.

The Dead Sea effect is also what you get when people are rewarded for designing a system with unknown performance properties. They get promoted and move onto another project, meanwhile lower level people stay on board and discover all the quirks, oddities, bugs, flaws, shortcomings, etc of the "well designed system", and have to do solid work to keep it running.

Of course, that's all they are viewed as doing - keeping the system running - all the glory was reaped by the evaporated developer who moved onto other teams to make similar mistakes as before(since they weren't around to experience/fix them).

I have seen this a few times. In fact one place I've worked had it so bad that this was entire MO for a "director's pet" engineer. it would not even be a fully functional product but just a proof-of-conceptish hacked together design that demos basic feature with a bunch of shortcuts. this would be just credible enough to take credit of the design and move on. I have even seen him create a bunch of confluence pages with half baked info just so that the claim could be staked.

usually this is accompanied by technically clueless management.

This feels like a gross oversimplification. The last company I left had plenty of brilliant people that I would consider at least as smart and knowledgable as I am. Many are still there. Those people have a lot of influence and credibility within the organization and value those things. Some people stick around because of the maturity of the organization, as they have worked in less stable operations, i.e. lots office politics and backstabbing, and know how bad it can be.

I'm not saying I don't think I'm smart, but my primary motivation was compensation.

Url changed from https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#the-dead-sea-effect, which points to this.

Please follow the site guidelines. Note this one: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a great resource.

Why is this rule (Dead Sea Effect) chosen for promotion more than all the other ones that list?

It must be because as a representative it can do the least damage (Dilberts Principle) or because... ;)

A corollary is that any open position is more likely to be for a "Dead Sea" employer/team/manager. (more likely than for a non-open position)

Turnover is far higher for bad situations.

Erik Dietrich has a great article expanding on this principle [1].

[1]https://daedtech.com/how-to-keep-your-best-programmers/

EDIT: a comment on that link makes the point one of the best ways to retain great developers is to surround them with other great developers. I think this hits the nail on the head.

Here's a good example of companies and execs min-maxing their human cattle. How about you just do a good job evaluating your employees? If you're happy with them, great, if they need improvement help them. If they're doing a bad job replace them. Stop assuming the personal motivations of other people's lives with your pop-psychology nonsense.

This is something I've been mulling over for such a long time and want to resist simple answers.

But this phenomenon seems to hold true no matter the organization: A new hire for position or level X with Y years of experience will ALWAYS have a higher salary than a veteran at that organization with level X and experience Y, for Y > ~2yrs.

How is "talented" defined here?

Some people bounce around to different companies. They are never necessarily productive in the roles they are constantly leaving. They may be only "talented" at being hired.

On the other side of the coin, the author defines the "residue" as "the least talented and effective IT engineers... that tend to be grateful they have a job and make fewer demands on management" and "tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems".

Aren't these so-called "residue" people at least demonstrably "talented"? They are providing value to the company by maintaining things that actually make the business money without grumbling about it.

As others have mentioned, this is entirely dependent on the organization. The issue is that talented people hit a ceiling faster than anyone else. Organizations aim for stability, and that will usually come at the cost of stifling top performers.

Businesses have their growth cycles, and ambitious people are attracted to growth. Many times, they will ride the growth wave of a company until its crest, then catch a wave at a different company.

I have personally never encountered a company that had an adequate mechanism for retaining these kinds of people, and maybe they shouldn't. As long as they don't burn bridges, maybe they will come back and work on a future project.

Is a nice catchy phrase, but not a good model

It fits a certain segment of organizations quite well, but it's not universal.

The principle would be just nice if it were true, but it has different assumptions that don't hold in quite many situations.

To me, it appears it presumes almost something like Santa Claus existing world, where "everybody gets what he deserves" (where you "evaporate" to some place better for you) which isn't how typically the world functions.

Moreover the concept of "talent" is involved in the principle, which is not something that I would use as the name of the property that I would use for selection of people who'd work on some project.

Yeah, I can't help but detect some wishful thinking on the part of the author. If you're asserting some principle, there ought to be an objective way to validate it - so, how do you know? If it's really true that "the best people will always leave", they'll leave the next employer after they left you. So, the best people are definitionally the people who never keep any job for any appreciable amount of time? How could you possibly measure their contribution anywhere?

This one is amazing: https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#kernighans-law

> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

The word "clever" has always been a low key insult when coming from me about code, and this describes the reason perfectly.

my acid-test for the code is 'what if we have to add a conceptually incremental feature to this?', apply this and see many of these clever concoctions fall apart.

I guess this is about me.

I spent nearly 27 years at my last job. I must be terrible.

I ran a small, high-functioning team of engineers with over 30 years' experience each, writing advanced image processing pipelines in C++.

When our team was finally disbanded, the person in my team with the least tenure was ten years.

Nowadays, I am "refactoring" myself back to being a full-time coder (as opposed to a manager and part-time coder), and, most likely, a teacher and author.

I'm much more junior that you, but I don't think it necessarily makes someone a "chump" to work at the same company for so long. it might not be what you would do if you optimize solely for lifetime earnings, but there's more to life than that. sounds like the people on your team found a job where they did interesting work with a manager / team lead they respected. I wouldn't be in a hurry to leave that either.

Here is the direct url to the "Dead Sea Effect":

https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws/blob/master/README.md...

This is a very problematic Ayn Randian bullshit that should not be propagated and spread. Not every culture revolves around a constant race to the top. Outside of a very competitive circle that mostly consists of a few towns in the EU, but mostly small parts of the US, the rest of the world actually has the concept where a programmer or any worker finds a good place and just works there until they retire. That is not a problem. That should not be a problem.

Yes, there are people who will keep amining for their percieved top, but whatever they do, lets not ever take this concept and look at actual human beings that you see in a company and treat them as "Residue". This is behaviour that would place you firmly in the "ignore, only deal with this person if I absolutely have to" category.

I would love to work at the same company until I retire. The problem is that to actually make more money and gain skills you MUST, as a software engineer, hop jobs every 2-3 years. I wish it weren't so, but that's just how it is right now. Add to it the fact that most companies don't care to actually train or retain their talent, and you've just got more incentive to hop.

You are right that it takes luck or very careful strategy to be able to learn multiple fields within programming inside one single company. In my current place, I consider myself very lucky that I got the opportunity to do multiple languages (starting off as TS, to move into C# and backend), and also had the chance to do a (p)React-based ui redesign as well, so that ticks three boxes without having to move around.

But lets not forget that many companies usually do change up web stacks as well, so there might be opportunities every now and then too.

There are plenty of level 9-10's at amazon who didn't move every 2 years. Pay is around $600 - $900K? Someone can correct.

I'm not sure if this is enough for the job hoppers but retention is not terrible (despite the Amazon stories that no one lasts longer than a week and cries at their desk every day).

one exception: people too autistic to have the connections needed for finding new jobs, especially outside of SV.

I wish it were the case

Good to see Hofstadter's Law in there.

Not sure if anybody has mentioned this flaw yet, but this supposed "Dead Sea Effect," if real, would rely upon the least-talented engineers being able to accurately asses their own talent level.

This is contrary to the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect which, unlike the "Dead Sea Effect", has at least been backed by some studies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

    "[Dunning-Kruger effect] is related to the cognitive
    bias of illusory superiority and comes from the
    inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.
    Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people
    cannot objectively evaluate their competence or   
    incompetence"

Also, as others have said...

Even if the low-skilled engineers were able to recognize their lack of talent -- which they often cannot -- this "effect" would only hold true, if ever, in a company where folks are actively trying to leave.

The company I work for is a pretty happy place. Whether I am the most talented person there, the least talented, or somewhere inbetween... the reason I'm there has nothing to do with a belief that I won't be able to find equivalent or better work elsewhere.

> Not sure if anybody has mentioned this flaw yet, but this supposed "Dead Sea Effect," if real, would rely upon the least-talented engineers being able to accurately asses their own talent level.

No, it only requires hiring managers from other firms to do so; better alternative prospects is sufficient to explain the effect.

> This is contrary to the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect

No, even if the prior part was wrong, it would be contrary to the popular misperception of D-K, but not the actual D-K effect [0], in which self-assessment is compressed (on both ends) toward somewhere in the third quartile, but still monotonically increasing with actual ability, such that the better people are at something the better they think they are, it's just that the bottom ~2/3 somewhat overestimate where they are in the distribution and the top ~1/3 underestimate it.

But, relevant to the situation at end, since positive self-assessment still increases with ability, even if higher self-assessment with higher real ability was needed to drive the Dead Sea effect, that would be exactly what the D-K research shows exists.

[0] https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com