Revolutionaries at the Workplace
damnoptimist.substack.com
damnoptimist.substack.com
The key attribute that both R and E types here seem to share is _caring_ and a commitment to a larger team goal/outcome.
The care/don’t care distinction seems clearer to me and much more recognizable. Within _cares_ people, there may be a further divide in styles, between progressive idealist and tactical/strategic (corresponding to R and E). But the thing about caring, is if you care, you’ll notice if your approach isn’t working or you need to change your style to suit the environment.
The implication of this framing is that leaders really need to make sure there is a clear vision/goal/outcome/mission for the _cares_ people to organize around. They also may need to recognize that most people unfortunately don’t care about their work or their contribution to society beyond raising their children and consuming, and that’s fine/not likely to change.
For people who care, then, the task is to recruit/organize the people in the organization to help avoid counterproductive work, and nudge things in the right direction.
(And of course, like nearly all categorizations of complex human systems into binary, my categorization is just a concept to organize thought, not an assertion of truth; people are fluid and drift between and sit on a spectrum between those categories)
The mission is normally the same: to make the founders very rich. Everything feeds into that with a layer of “we better be reasonably good to staff because its hard to attract and retain talent”.
When there isn’t supply/demand on your side then as a worker you end up like the factory workers who have to work through a tornado.
My caring comes from pride in my work and intrinsic motivation mostly, not from the mission of the company. The mission after all is to make people rich.
Thats why i find bonuses weird. A bonus is based on a metric, and that metric is probably gameable. Share of revenue is probably best if you want to pay a bonus. Or just increase salaries.
'A' players hire 'A' players.
'B' players hire 'C' players.
Independent of Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary, we have pure intelligence, education, and animal cunning. An 'A' player has all those, and moreover knows when a Revolutionary strategy is required, and when it's not.
A 'B' player tends to be Evolutionary, because it's safer, but occasionally he'll say "me, too!" to a Revolutionary if it seems to advance his career.
An 'A' player can recognize another one. That's all he or she wants to hire.
A 'B' player is bewildered and threatened by an 'A" player, and moreover, the 'A' player wants nothing to do with him. So he wants to hire someone who's safe and no threat to his tenuous position: the 'C' player.
After the startup is successful, the 'B' managers flood it with their resumes. They like a safe bet. Once they get in and start hiring their own, it's all over.
If A players could recognize another one, our industry's hiring wouldn't be so incredibly broken.
The idea that there are clear layers of engineering skill is... just plain wrong, and that's obvious to anyone who's worked on more than a few teams. It's a spectrum, and more, it's multidimensional. So is the idea that somehow people not in the top layer automatically hire worse people. I've worked with top skilled people (think "starting an entire new segment") who couldn't hire their way out of a wet paper bag. I've work with solid performers who weren't outstanding in any way, except they consistently hired excellent people.
I've also worked with people who were mediocre performers by themselves, but who significantly accelerated any team they were on. Not by visible output, but by being clearly necessary "glue" that bound the team closer together and helped people to shine.
I've seen superstars go to mediocre, and vice versa, just based on managers and or team they were on.
If you can't think about people in more subtle ways than "A,B,C" or "Revolutionaries vs Evolutionaries", you are significantly shortchanging yourself and your team.
Since you've alluded to your experiences: I've picked a startup based only on their business description, where I didn't know a single person, and it IPO'ed in about 18 months. Then the 'B' players flooded in, and some other unrelated stuff happened. What have you done?
I'd say you gotta use many metrics, the simpler they are the more metrics you'd need. simple metrics ignore the subtelties which can make or break.
I think when outside "experts" come in and talk to you, they have one Summary slide at the end that gives their own "simple metrics" and that's what everyone remembers anyway.
Anybody can do that once. If you could do it a hundred times in a row, or develop a science of picking startups, I might be more inclined to believe you.
Let's review: the original article was a bit of pop psychology, like almost all "management science." I replied with some of my own. None of this is a double-blind, peer-reviewed study, and even if it were, it probably wouldn't be replicable, as others have pointed out.
groby_b then replied with some high-sounding condescension, puffing himself up: "our industry's hiring wouldn't be so incredibly broken" via all the incredible things he's seen. Except he didn't use any overt insults -- just passive aggressiveness.
Things went downhill from there.
Sure.
I've worked on DIS. I've worked on industrial automation. I've worked on AAA games. Yes, I've been on (successful) startups as well. Yes, I've consulted, too. I've worked on the European space program. I'm currently responsible for a good-sized engineering org.
I'm in this business for something like 30+ years now. And based on all those experiences, I'm fairly certain that your simplistic approach will bite you, your team, your project at some point. I'm also fairly certain that you'll protest that strenuously until it happens. So, godspeed, and may the experience not be too painful.
You invested in a company and profited by it. That's all that tells us. B can follow A, it doesn't follow that A caused B.
I see this in finance all the time. Traders perform so inconsistently at long timeframes, no better than chance, but think their training—domain knowledge—gives them systems knowledge. Systems are more than the sum of their parts or the individual actions of agents.
Boxing people into USDA grades like flesh is only ever constraining and I don't think the abstraction here collapses any uncertainty in exchange.
People are not static; they're not just their genes, and they're not just a grade. You said you're an A player, why don't we compare your hiring to a random selection of hiring managers with similar experience in your field?
My degree was in Integrative Neuroscience and I'd caution people against these "just so!" explanations. A good narrative is often more convincing than the correct one.
Once you start trying to codify potential or current employees into buckets delineated by simplistic and frankly silly metrics and not by the value they produce in a given set of domains and contexts, then you've already lost the game.
It's just a (sometimes) useful way of thinking about top executives, who mostly can be assigned grades. Engineers are too complex to be divided that way.
As for me: yes, some A players did decide I could be useful. I think I was, as an engineer, and they thought so too. On hiring people: the record was more mixed; some good and some not so great.
This is the difference between the revolutionary colleague and the jerk.
Some people are self-described “truth tellers” (I.e. jerks). Or the annoying ones whose motivation is to look “good”.
The ones who are genuine are hard to get upset with.
I’ve pretty much only worked at “cause” companies. I would think someone like this might be annoying at a company “revolutionizing the corporate purchasing space”
Even accepting his premise of Rs vs Es, this seems absurdly short-sighed. Engineers come and go, engineers can change their R/E approach over time or based on project. If you feel like you can't manage a team full of Rs - and decide to hire a less talented E for balance - then the problem is the way you manage. Take ownership of your employees and find ways to use their talents, don't throw your hands up and hire for some personality type that you imagine you've sussed out over a set of one hour interviews.
For me the difference comes more down to, as with the conflicts within lots of political groups in history: reformists vs non-reformists. The former advocating the reform of an existing system or institution whereas the others believe the right approach is abolition and replacement. You could also add reactionaries, those that want to go back how things used to be.
Neither of which is universally true I think, more often than not it is a mix. But I don't think you get very far trying to mix the extremes from either side.
I guess it takes some calibration to know when it’s the time to be the jerk, but there are times it’s definitely necessary.
If we look at any personality type system, the revolutionary/reformers are going to be a quadrant of discrete personalities (and even those can be broken down or treated as a gradient).
As an easy example, I'm one of the types in that quadrant. While I tend to be independent and self confident, I'm not "an inspiring leader". I also have a strong preference for consensus (or at least peaceful agreement), and prefer not being the center of attention.
Please give this piece about as much attention as you would todays horoscope and instead read a few good papers on pubmed.
The article comes across like "R" and "E" are set characteristics--almost like a personality trait. I'd really like to longitudinal see data on R/E mobility, and how fluidity between R/E types might be related to team cohesion overall.
Mid article though, it says
> That’s because organizations tend to become more bureaucratic, political and consensus-driven as they grow.
Is this somehow ever a good thing? Largely, all of those things just seem bad. Luxuries of inefficiency a product can enjoy only once it works itself into dominant/monopoly position where it’s bankrolling becomes secure.
The groups I’ve moved away from over the years (often with other revolutionaries moving on as well), became more evolutionary. And all of them have basically devolved into product lines on life support, the “evolutionary” employees left behind don’t understand why management won’t invest in them and would rather buy up competitive offerings to remain relevant.
Hot take: a big part of the utility of these "mature" companies in society is to serve as a kind of glorified daycare for adults. The people they employ can feel like they're contributing something to society, and legitimately earning the money they're bringing home, even if a bird's eye view would reveal that they're just treading water and not really producing any net benefit. This allows the employees to feel better about themselves than they would if the government just handed them a UBI paycheck and sent them back to playing videogames all day.
I've seen a lot of turmoil between people who are legitimately trying to make the world a better place through their work (spoiler: it wasn't always me), and coworkers that prefer to just operate in daycare mode.
On-topic, I think its a natural evolution for organizations to stagnate and calcify unless there is a fundamental recreation. Lots of things could be cherry-picked here for anecdata (Roman Republic, Roman Empire, General Electric, <insert fortune 100 company here>)
I don't think that's bad. You wouldn't want an innovative person being your line cook at a restaurant -- you want the innovative person to be the chef. We also don't want the laws governing the countries we live in to violently change. Systemic, evolutionary, progress is good.
The challenge is figuring out a balance and what to do to prevent the organization from calcifying (becoming product lines on life support), prevent it from throwing away what makes the organization good (chasing the next big thing), and continue to let the organization innovate and thrive (stay relevant) without being eaten.
Stop clarifying people this way. It's not useful, it's not insightfully. I have seen coworkers fighting for one thing but not another. One fights against bad work ethics, another for good tech and another one for their own right too be with his family. People is complex, everything comes in gradients and that changes as people grows and they learn and their lives change.
If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
Author seems to be just written some intelligent sounding thing seemingly inspired by *Capital in the 21st Century*
> look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
Isn't psychology famously pseudoscience as well, given almost all of their studies are irreproducible.
No part of this article is intended to mislead you into thinking it's scientific or technical in nature. It is one person's opinion and they are sharing it and there's nothing wrong with that. You can disagree, agree, share your own insights, but calling it pseudoscience is uncalled for.
>If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of consensus on this and most other subjects, as well as an inability to reproduce a substantial portion of research. Take two different psychology courses related to what the author is discussing and you'll come away with two very different understandings.
Finally I would like to distinguish psychology from psychiatry, as the two are often lumped together, unfairly so.
You are right, this is just bullshit. It does not pretend to be a scientific study, I over interpreted what it was saying.
> There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of consensus on this and most other subjects
That is a reason to beware of some random opinion, assertiveness does not need to correlate with reason. That this text is assertive does not make it valuable. I see no more learning that people will categorize others in search of a simplicity that is not there. As I said, it's not insightful in any way, it just simplifies to make people feel smart and think that they understand some truth that is no there.
"Things are complicated" gets thrown against every opinion that people don't like. Not saying anything is wisdom. God forbid anybody has any opinion and may God strike him down if he ever supports anything but tabula rasa.
Things got done before studies existed, you know. People built models from intuition and tested them in practice. Or observed patterns. But that's the old wrong ways, right? We publish something on a piece of paper now and unless a committee publishes it and calls it a study it can't be true. And if they do it's true and will remain this way forever, right?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Blog posts etc. obviously don't need to be scientific studies and there's nothing wrong with people posting them here if they're interesting. HN is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal or conference.
I've noticed that there's a group that wouldn't have a question but would phrase their monologue to seem like a question.
Was Baudrillard's point essentially that capitalism is always the "main" function (hee hee) in the outer scope with everything else becoming subroutines/subprocesses/etc. of it? E.g., "Revolutionary" here is merely a local variable to a function do_capitalism_more_efficiently, rather than itself being a global variable in its own right.
I mean, I get that Baudrillard was essentially focusing on certain edge cases: e.g., where function challenge_capitalism was in fact running in a VM that was spun up by function do_capitalism_more_efficiently. But with that caveat, is there anything important I'm missing from his writing with my analogies to scope here?