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Comment by piercebot | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the point about managers and decision-makers setting the tone with regard to the "hurry up" culture, but I take exception with one line:

> Expecting great things of all your workers

Why is it not OK to expect great things out of everybody on your team? Surely people don't want to feel excluded from the "great performers" group? Surely people don't want to feel that they're not capable of great things?

I'm completely in favor of giving everybody the time and space they need to do their best work, but then to _also_ assume that some people are incapable of producing great work given the time and support they need to achieve it... isn't that the definition of an under-performer?

As decision makers, don't we have an obligation to identify the people who do great work and empower them? Isn't it our job to create the environment in which _everybody_ does great work? Why is it not OK to expect that everybody does great work?

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The best teams IMO have about a 10/10/80 split between people who do great work and know it, people who do great work and don't know it, and people who don't do great work (caveat: they should do ACCEPTABLE work) but are aware of their limitations. There's only so much work that you want your talent to be doing and you can try and keep the major touch points to your power players, and then you try to silo off the drudgery to the folks who are happy to have something hard to fail at. The personality type of the good-and-knows-it tends to need to be offset by the humble good-but-unsure types. Heaven forbid you get even one worker who can crank out productivity like no tomorrow and claims to be doing good work because in a vacuum everything is functional but they optimize only to close tasks and leave the system in total disrepair. It takes literal years to clean up some messes, and from experience I tend to prefer working with people who adhere to N > quality(output) > 0 over those at |quality(output)| > N.

Yes, this mirrors directly that old adage from that German general [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#Cl...

Thanks for the thoughtful reply; I'd never heard of Hammerstein-Equord before, so that was enlightening.

I think I've lived a charmed life in that, for the past 7 years, I've worked at a company without a bell curve distribution in terms of employees. We're extremely "top heavy" in terms of experience and ability, and there has been a distinct lack of ego as well. At previous companies I would agree with your assessments about types of people, but having seen what's possible when you hire only the best people through your professional networks who only want to work with other talented ego-less individuals, I may be guilty of holding myself to unrealistic expectations.

That said, we're becoming a victim of our own success now and we need to hire outside of our tapped-out professional networks. Perhaps as we achieve a more "normal" distribution, the more "normal" advice will start to apply. A good problem to have, but still a new problem where there wasn't one previously.

Only if they are forwarned about not making it instead of given false hope to sell them their position

>Why is it not OK to expect that everybody does great work?

Because the ways in which this usually manifests is "hurry up" culture. How is "great work" measured and what is the manager's responsibility for assigning/distributing work that is appropriate to each employee?

I'm not sure it's the manager's responsibility to compartmentalize and then assign/distribute work to each employee. Aren't people happier and more productive when they're in charge of their own destiny?

I view the manager's role as one that clearly defines and communicates business imperatives and facilitates communication about how to get there. If you're telling people exactly what to do, how does that enable them to do great work? Aren't they just doing what the manager tells them to?

>Aren't people happier and more productive when they're in charge of their own destiny?

Sometimes, but there are also people who just want to accomplish the task at hand and collect a paycheck. And for the enthusiastic employee, a good manager should be able to tell if someone is over-committing themselves and setting themselves up for failure. A good manager should be able to deal with a range of enthusiasm and adjust accordingly.

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