I had the pleasure of pair programming with ye olde rockstar for two weeks and we added more value in those two weeks to the company than the rest of the team did in a year.
I'm the cto I should know.
I only rockstar when my incentive structure has an unbounded ceiling. If you're paying me a salary, plus meager bonus, plus some bennies, plus some lottery tickets -- you're gonna get me at my 40-60%. Just enough to be above average.
Throw in some profit-sharing, and now we're talking, baby. What ever happened to that? Share some of the pie and I'll jump as high as you need me to.
Anything else is just foolish!
I ask because while I don't reject this position, isn't there something to be said for intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation: one's internal notion of excellence, pride, discipline, respect, mastery, craft, grit... insert various honoring-self words.
Seems precarious to me, to let external dictate ones concept of value. Btw, I suffer from "doing my best" so that's why I'm curious, I am not shilling for BigCo.
I do not have notions of excellence, pride, discipline, respect, mastery, craft, grit, or anything of higher substance inside of me. At one point in my life, I'm sure I did, but they have been beaten out of me. Some have been taken advantage of by the ulterior motives of others; and some have simply not been conducive to achieving my goals (i.e. having fun, putting bread on the table, not ending up in the streets, living a leisurely and relaxed life, etc.).
In another vein, one could make the argument that the precarious thing is to tie one's intrinsic motivations -- those little devils inside of us -- onto a "job." That job will one day end, and you will have to find another as an effective outlet for those little devils; otherwise depression and all sorts of psychological illness will start encroaching. If one wishes to keep one's values strong, why make them dependent on uncontrollable things? Unless you are independently wealthy (if that is the case, I can offer nothing), there will be times you will be required to make sacrifice of your values to "get the job done." You will have to be sloppy, amateur, lazy, selfish, and maybe even villainous to do what needs to be done. At that point, you can hold strong and suffer the consequences, or you can relent, tell yourself you are temporarily setting aside higher ideals (it never is temporary), get the job done... and suffer the consequences.
Tying your soul, your essence to such a thing is precarious. Putting your heart into things that will require you to abdicate your integrity is foolish. You will end up hurt, broken, and missing pieces of yourself. It is better, and more sustainable, to save that sort of thing to matters that aren't directly related to your survival. Otherwise, to charge steadfastly into what one knows will be suffering is noble, but foolish.
Excellence is not in contrast to fun, leisure, and relaxation; it's made that way via Capitalism and hustle culture.
> In another vein, one could make the argument that the precarious thing is to tie one's intrinsic motivations -- those little devils inside of us -- onto a "job."
Well said. I suppose it does take more energy, effort and soul really, to constantly decouple one's job from identity and worth. That one's internal values _ought_ to permeate through one's life "authentically" is certainly easier said than done.
Thanks again for responding in earnest. I'm convinced lol.
to ignore incentives is folly. they drive the behavior of others around you as well.
bad incentives lead to endless kingdom building and mediocrity. good incentives lead to a brighter future.
Nothing wrong with them doing this, of course. And they're very smart people. But you really can tell the difference between "software developer who takes pride in their work and wants to build something great" versus "software developer who wants to pay their bills". It's the difference between the developer who responds to a packaging problem by learning their build and dependency management system inside out to understand what's going on, versus the developer who copies and pastes from SO/ChatGPT until it works for some reason and moves on with their life.
Granted, not all software development companies deserve the former. But a tightly focused startup with 50 developers from the former category can absolutely dominate the market, at least until they get acquired, as we've seen so many times before: e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, OpenAI.
On what basis are they smart?
These are different skills and responsibilities from being an elite rockstar developer.
Oh, and I still code. Because I like to code. A lot.
Luckily for the throwaway person above, it says the same for them. But does still show results for some, maybe only big accounts now?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709
edit: ahh, I think it just took a one-time snapshot of the three years leading up to its 2021 creation, as my old username that I changed to swores does show up. So it's an interesting proof of concept that someone could do similar analysis, but not an ongoing tool. So it won't be telling us which CTO to avoid :P
Edit: I think it was this one that has been shut down: https://stylometry.net/
> We need to keep track of the time your spending on your opex KIPs. We can't pay your expected bonus if you don't.
IME when I've seen a "1/10th engineer" it's almost always been a total management failure.
Turns out reading HN comments is not a good way to run a company. Who would have thought?
Remind me, whose job is it to convince other execs and the board of the most appropriate talent strategy? Maybe lesson 1 here is "if you're running a company and don't trust your CTO, look for a new one"?
There's probably nothing wrong with your existing team except it being too large and democratic. One guy can bounce ideas around in his head faster than a dozen negotiating them with each other. I've seen teams like yours, and IME the issue isn't always incompetence, sometimes each of them thinks they're the rockstar. Anytime one of them doesn't get their way, they jam everything up for everyone else.
We've become too democratic as a whole. Nobody follows orders from above; everybody expects to have a say in things they don't even have a stake in. Whenever you get to hiring again, try stacking your team with 2-4 ex-military types and see how it works out for you (it works well for UPS well beyond that scale). You don't get bleeding-edge experience (and never a 10x-er), but you get tax breaks, competence, obedience, people trained to work as a cohesive unit, and you can wave the flag and call yourself a patriot (which helps with government contracts if that's your business).
Literally everyone thought this, and probably even the talentless hacks that you hired. Strange that you had to create a throwaway account to figure this one out.