Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

I'm an introvert, I love working from home, I live in the woods with a 1/3rd mile long driveway. Since my youngest went off to college I'm here alone with her fish and a cat. I go into town once or twice a week for supplies and the rest of the time I'm just out here in my little sanctuary enjoying the lack of people.

That said, even I know that while individuals matter, teams matter more. And I don't see anything in this entire post about how to build a team or sustain a team or inspire them to support each other. Absolutely nothing about how you can develop skill and aptitude in junior folks or redirect conflict or conveying the importance of actually shipping something vs running marathons on the tech debt treadmill. You know all the shit that has to happen in the real world to keep people happy and invested. All I see is an ode to the 10x'er and how sucking up to them might keep them around long enough to be successful.

I love HN and the community overall but there are few things more predictable than this story making it from new to the front page lol.

Previously from danluu.com on the topics you mentioned

Company culture matters https://danluu.com/culture/

Different organisations have radically different expectations about how fast and well you can work https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/

Different organisations are capable of different things because of the (kinds of) people who work there https://danluu.com/in-house/

Two different kinds of oransations work very differently https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

Different organisations hire differently and this can be an enduring (dis)advantage https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

Being better than most people isn't that hard because most people aren't trying https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

All of these are about organizations and individuals, not teams.

No, they're not - at least if teams have some base level of autonomy. A team could choose to grow itself along the dimensions in https://danluu.com/culture/ without the company even knowing.

> All I see is an ode to the 10x'er and how sucking up to them might keep them around long enough to be successful.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy Dan Luu's writings and I'm thankful that he shares his thoughts.

That said, a lot of his recent writings present extremely rare, specialized situations like small teams of carefully-selected 10X-er type programmers who are hand-picked from their sterling reputations and naturally extremely motivated. If you find yourself in a top 1% unicorn team like that, a lot of his writings ring true. Trying to apply arbitrary big-company management to highly-optimized, high-performing teams like that is a mistake.

However, statistically most of us won't be working on or managing those unicorn teams. Trying to apply top-1% advice to the median team is going to result in a lot of mismatches.

Generally speaking, HN isn't a great place to get any sort of management advice. The userbase is mostly IC engineers, and as a result the upvotes tend to follow what IC engineers want to hear. Writing an article about making the difficult management choices that come with managing real-world (not top-1%) teams is hard to do without upsetting a lot of readers, so instead we get a lot of "engineers good, managers bad" type articles even if the authors start out with best intentions.

I didn't get that feel out of this at all. Sure, there was mention of a few individuals who were "10x-ers", but I read it as appreciating each individual for what they can bring to the team and to the org, which is always different for each person.

The point is that people are not fungible. Some people have specialized skills, while others have a broad breadth of skills. They won't both be good at completing the same tasks, so you can't reorg to put them in positions that don't make use of their strengths and expect success.

The bit about budgets was really eye-opening. Reducing things to "headcount" instead of figuring out what kind of people you need for a team or project is a great way to fail. If you just say "hey, you can hire three level-2 people", but believe that hiring two level-3 people (assuming at your org that the total cost for both of those is the same) will be more successful, and get told you can't do that, that is a failure of the organization.

I agree. I think there is a strange trend of fetishicization of individual contributor capacity in tech world, some sort of hero syndrome. Even a lot of posts about 'culture' and 'organization' end up being about how at the end of the day these affect individual performance not how well the organization performs overall. Maybe we can all take lessons from playing in a team sport - it's true that the team will do poorly if each individual contributors perform poorly on their own for whatever reason but what wins the game is not about how well everyone played on their own.

"Individuals matter" does not mean that teams do not.

The "individuals matter" is contrasted with "individuals do not matter" and not with "teams matter".

If you think about this it is exactly pro-team. It means that the team is built from the people that compose the team and people are sometimes intimately linked together through the circumstances in which the team was built and cannot be easily replaced. The team building is path dependent and that path cannot be easily replicated.

There are even examples of this in the article.

Most effective people are not only because they are magical 10x people, but also because they have the right experience and knowledge in the situation. Skills and knowledge the company might have given them over years.

I think there are ways of reading this without ever thinking some people are 10x super humans while the rest are not.

That doesn't go against the point of this article, it enhances it. Teams mattering reduces the fungibility of people even further.

Individuals matter for the team as well.

Put a person who doesn't get along with people as a team leader and watch what happens.

Teams are mentioned near the bottom in the section about reorgs.

Wow, how do I start a list of people to never work for.

i’ve had one for years. the way you start is, when you meet an asshole, write their name and company and job title down, and a short, less than 20 words, statement describing the assholery. keep doing that for a few years and watch as patterns start to emerge.

I think the article also applies to teams - in particular, how not to destroy teams by ignoring the individuality of the team members, and indeed of the team itself.

Each individual grouping of humans is unique in its social dynamics, relationships, culture, expertise, etc and so will be uniquely effective or ineffective at identifying and achieving desired outcomes.

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