27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process
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Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.
We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO
Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field.
Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.
next didn't fall to pieces. it birthed the world-wide web, then merged with apple, replacing apple's then ceo, and provided the software stack that currently powers the macintosh line, ipod, iphone, and ipad. i can understand why you would describe next as a failure if it was 01996 and we were having this conversation on compuserve or fidonet, but in retrospect it seems obvious that next was at least the second most important software firm of the 80s and early 90s
NeXT was a failure: because it didn’t make a profit, and its products were wildly overpriced for everyone but a tiny niche market like university CS departments and researchers, which didn’t provide it enough of a market to survive on its own. If it had been successful, NeXT could have bought Apple, not the other way around. Or more likely, just carried on by itself, IPO’d or whatever.
NeXT was a huge success: because tech developed there was hugely influential to future technology used even decades later.
it's hard to imagine what would have counted as a bigger success for steve jobs
rod canion redefined the entire computer business once: he made open platforms dominant for personal computers. steve jobs did it four times: in 01977 by converting personal computers from hobbyist machines to home appliances; in 01984 by making the wimp gui the dominant interaction paradigm; in 01998 by redefining personal computers from home appliances to fashion accessories; and in 02007 by replacing the open-platform wimp gui with non-end-user-programmable sealed prisons with multitouch and always-on mobile internet access
obviously none of these involved him inventing anything, and most of them are at best morally ambiguous, but certainly he set out to do each of those things and then successfully did them
Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes.
Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
The first success (Apple) may have been in large part right-place/right-time (and by right place: friend of Wozniak).
But his second big success (Apple's rebirth) I kind of have to give Jobs all the credit. It looks as though none of the CEO's that came before Jobs could save the company the way Jobs seemed to single-handedly come back and do it.
To be sure though he had wandered the desert for years and learned a lot of hard truths. That no doubt made him the capable decision maker he turned out to ultimately be in the end.
If it didn't happen, our business mythology today would full of tales about Jobs, the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.
The Steve from the Second Advent of Jobs was a dramatically improved version of him, seasoned in no small part by this "humilliation".
Easy to say in hindsight. Canion, who was worshipped by the GP, also got fired by Compaq but never bounced back. Or may be that’s a testament to Jobs’s ability to learn and adapt.
> the lose cannon that destroyed apple with his megalomanic and narcissistic ego.
I doubt it. Apple was Jobs’s number one priority, even to the detriment of its employees, including himself. He literally worked until his death. He has been labeled many things. Apple destroyer wouldn’t be one.
Nobody wants to remember the boring business IBM compatible market but not only did Compaq make the first 386 (redefining what a PC was) they also got the other manufacturers to rally around things like the EISA bus which abruptly stopped IBM's dominance of the PC standard and made a truly open market that not only swallowed PCs, but took the minicomputer industry out at as well and everything you have on your desktop and server room is still rooted in those seminal Compaq products.
It was Eckhard Pfieffer who eventually screwed the pooch and put Compaq into HPs grasp. If Canion had been allowed to flesh out his strategy for lower cost PCs that might never have happened.
Apple was always a 10% of the market sideshow until they made the iPhone.
Stephen King had his first book Carrie rejected 30 times.
The author of Dr Seuss had his first book rejected by 27 different publishers.
Walt Disney was fired from one of his first animation jobs.
Everyone fails. Not everyone gives up.
The flipside is that not everyone can afford to not give up.
It's very easy to dimiss successful people as lucky without acknowledging the perseverance that goes into pushing through all the failures until you get a success, but it's also easy to dismiss people who never hit that success as lacking that perseverance.
The important part to focus on is not giving up.
You'll see some cynical takes such that: well if an entrepreneur had a really great thing, they'd have no terminal money problem to begin with (just show it to a VC, insta check). That's pretty blatantly false however, as the capital equation is a whole 'nother skillset and luck/chance/network factor that goes to work for or against your efforts.
easily disproved by John Sculley, among others.
Or you could look at all the PC companies that launched in the early 80's (Eagle Computer, looking at you).
Or Digital Research. Or Lotus. Or WordPerfect.
Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help.
> We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.
You should read his email to Eric Schmidt, he outlined his bold, bout-of-the-box ideas on keeping great talent.
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543
second result on Kagi using “steve jobs email to eric schmidt”
Most people think they're putting out great content. But that's obviously false. One side of Steve's point about letting elite talent do their work presupposes that the talent is elite. Mediocre talent will do much worse work if not bound to process, and Steve was very, very good at rooting out what he thought was mediocre talent.
- accept the need guidance
- follow some standards and rules to make work reproduceable and understabdable by others
- be able to work in teams
People tend to ignore the finer points in whatever Steve Jobs said, especially after his return to Apple.
I think they did pretty well, didn't they win a few big titles?
- had Pep Guardiola as coach
- players like Messi, Xavi, Iniesta
But sure, the only super star during that period was Messi...
The 2017/18 team had, in addition to Messi, Iniesta, Suarez and Alba
But again, of course it was only Messi who carried them. Sure.
But even if he did, which he did not, there are only two players like this in his generation, Ronaldo and Messi. That means the vast majority of "rockstar" emoloyees by definition cannot be in that league.
if you pay 200+ bucks per mouth you want something amazing, and that usually means you pick from a fixed menu (interestingly your choices likely be a lot more limited compared to McDonald's), and that restaurant then does the well rehearsed dance and prepares the fancy food for you, with a lot more attention to detail, than what you would find (or need) in a McDonald's fast kitchen.
both are examples of 'process'
just as coming up with a new interesting-innovative-1-2-3-star entree or coming up with a new McD menu item are examples of a creative design process.
Maybe top talent also does worse work sans process, but they get away with it. That's my experience: Many take advantage of their power to disregard process (sometimes as a demonstration of power), which hurts the team, and undermines and creates extra work for others, but the top talent's contributions create a net gain.
Of course, this is a contrived example and even rockstars make mistakes too, but many mistakes are detectable/foreseeable and that’s the kind of thing good process is meant to help with.
We're working at instituting some process, it's a good thing as we've been cowboying out code for a long time, it's not sustainable, it's hard on everyone for all the usual reasons when a small company begins to grow and there haven't been a lot of processes. Tech debt, weird code, poor code reviews (if any ... mostly none), what is testing?, what documentation?, everything is in a few people's heads, and so on.
Having said that, I'm working on a new feature with another programmer and asking questions about this new feature we're working on together. Some of the ideas behind it just don't jive, I don't believe this thing will do what the customer needs (possibly not at all)... and certainly not in the best possible way. Now we're on the same page about a few things, mostly that we don't have enough information, but the response is different.
The other programmer thinks that we just need a better and more detailed user story as per the processes we're trying to put in place. To them that's the start and end of it. However, even that won't be good enough to me. A "better" user story built out of the ideas we have so far is just as flawed, there are already issues with what we've been told. At worst this will end up re-written because it does nothing the customer needs, or it does it in a really awkward and wonky way.
The other programmers response is "well that's the fault of the person who wrote that user story" and they would seem to just rather we write it as requested and roll on.
Not entirely wrong as far as just the business process goes ... but I'd rather actually solve the problem, and talk to the customer, get the details, talk it out with all involved so we can construct something more flexible, re-usable, and ... works.
But there is that process, that "it's this group's responsibility, not ours" that is such an easy out, entirely how things could work "correctly", and also in this case a plan for failure.
Steve said the folks who care about the content are a pain in the butt to work with, and I've got a few dozen questions I need to hammer some folks with about this new feature... they're not going to like it (they thought they were done with this when they made the request), but the questions need to be asked to do it right.
Hammer away with you questions. Because if they can’t convince you of their correctness, how can they convince a customer who is under no obligation to shift through their bullshit?
Yup, cog in the wheel type situation. I'm sure some guys like working like that... it has to be comfortable, but I don't like it when the end result is not good.
That was fatal. They didn't need the process and couldn't afford the overhead.
It's worth giving serious thought to whether your company is successful enough to survive this new strategy. It may be time to look for the exit.
What's blocking you from shipping the feature (as you see it) or raising your concern up the organization?
And I’ll get it.
Idk, is it that hopeless? Jump ships?
Nothing drives me crazier than working with people that are solely focused on process (and reporting), than considering the process in the context of getting the job done properly and efficiently.
But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Doesn't the growth and the adoption of those that don't have the skill handicap everyone else?
I've seen quite a few teams kneecap themselves this way by essentially hiring and growing: the team would've been, net-output-wise, more effective staying as a small team and not hiring.
Having seen this firsthand, (in my experience) it's been that executives or higher-ups decide that this team is working, and because they want to increase the company's bottom line, they will grow that team come hell or high water because in their minds, that team is correlated with results.
>Doesn't the growth and the adoption of those that don't have the skill handicap everyone else?
Considerably.
And example of this is (in finance) if some team at a bank or whatever all left as a group founded a small hedge fund or prop trading fund, yet were still able to make a great return.
A good eng manager or product owner says NO to a lot of crap. Bad ones triple their team size, hire managers of other managers to deal with the huge org, implement process to keep things sane, all to cram stuff into the product that should not even be written in the first place.
The small high-performing team is a fleeting state that will eventually be infiltrated by the average performer. Ideally you recognize when this is happening, implement the required processes and push through it to come out the other side as a slightly less efficient team that still gets more done because there is enough personnel to make up for the efficiency loss.
Because that team got stuck with all the work.
I’m not downplaying the relevance of content, but I’m simply arguing that performance is much more nuanced and diverse than just being good at content
I know someone that works in a sales oriented profession and who manages a large number of people. Their company is ruthless, you get only a couple of weeks to demonstrate you can hit the targets, and after that maybe a couple of weeks of grace after the hard talking to. Less than 50% of new hires make it through probation. Staff that survive all have the same attributes: excellent sales ability and focused determination. It also allows in a high percentage of narcissistic bastards though.
I don’t like the idea, but I wonder if a similar metric based probation would achieve the same in this industry. If you want people who can pump out quality content at a higher than average rate, set the bar high and cull ruthlessly during probation.
One of the historical reasons has been that it’s very hard to find and hire tech people - I wonder if that is changing?
It’s also been fairly easy for tech teams to obfuscate performance and bamboozle managers who don’t understand tech.
With sales the performance criteria tends to be very simple and there aren’t really any good excuses for failure (at least none that seem to be accepted).
Just as much a problem for sales oriented roles. Most “line managers” are experts in the field, so I don’t know if this is a valid point. In the anecdotal case, the managers still have sales targets and got to be managers by being the most effective sellers.
> With sales the performance criteria tends to be very simple and there aren’t really any good excuses for failure (at least none that seem to be accepted).
Here we are talking about producing, which by its nature is the measurable stuff. I think we don’t have it because we (some we) don’t want it, not because it wouldn’t work.
Sales is cut throat. They take in new people to extract all their first rate contacts (friends family). Once those are sucked out, they don't need you.
The problem is in most software businesses it can be hard to objectively measure who is providing business value and who is just lots of busywork
There is a saying „if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, you need a team”.
You're mis-quoting. Here's the quote:
> Organizational researchers have shown, similar to the 80/20 rule, the majority of your company's output comes from a minority of "superstar" performers: What's known as a power-law distribution.
The cutoff is arbitrary, e.g. one of the cited studies uses a 5/95 cutoff. [0]
[0] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizatio...
Generally you get normal distributions (bell curves) when you add together random variables. For example, if you roll 10 dices and add their numbers, the probability distribution will look somewhat like a bell curve. And if overall employee performance was the sum of their normally distributed human abilities, you would get another bell curve.
But it only works when add numbers. If you multiplied numbers instead of added them, you would get a log-normal distribution instead. Other processes can get you Pareto distributions (80/20).
Employee performance is a not just a sum of their individual abilities, there are some synergies happening, giving a multiplicative effect.
In other words, seeing a 80/20 type distribution shows that people are more than the sum of their parts, literally.
If the content is not good, the only tool some managers seem to have is process.
Tell that to almost all Y Combinator unicorns. They're all famous for internal chaos.
Just thinking out loud, not trying to be smarty pants, but on the other hand people that pontificate every musing from Steve Jobs feel a bit… uneducated to me. Publications such as inc feel geared towards people that consider themselves to understand technology because they are Apple power users. Bit like claiming to be specialist in slaughterhouses just because you eat 3 burgers per day.
It is also strange this being brought up now in 2024. Because from 2014 to 2021 or 2022, the only sentiment allowed was every employees are roughly equal. There are no high performer. No such thing as 10x programmers etc.
I have a feeling that's partially due to how much money a lot of those people (and Apple shareholders) have made under Cook's leadership. The growth has been nothing short of incredible. IIRC Apple shares have grown like 8x or 9x under him (when accounting for inflation).
That said, Apple products no longer really have that magic that they had under Jobs (IMO). That could be because they focus now on processes and operations much more than creative technologies. Besides the watch (which was a natural continuation/evolution after the creation of the iPhone), I can't really think of projects created and developed under Cook that are game-changers or come from left field.
Process people are great in times where you need to focus on doing the same thing, day in day out...or improve on those same things. In other words, operational execution. However, don't ever trust a process person to do any creative or abstract thinking - it's impossible for them. They have tremendous value for certain types of companies at certain key phases of growth. They are "how" people, not "why" people...and certainly not "what if" people.
However the magic really isn't gone. The Apple Pencil is a nice invention whose whole purpose is for creative endeavors.
Gradual refinement isn't a bad thing either. While this isn't a new invention, it definitely feels like magic to wake up, take my M1 Air everywhere I go, and not have to charge it again until I go to bed (even in 2024, I doubt I could do the same with a Dell XPS). The extra benefit is I have no gimmicky touch screen or never used 2in1 hinges to deal with as well.
Its insane that Microsoft, who also produces the XBox, just couldn't be bothered to produce a quality HTPC interface for Windows, when they already had all the elements for such as early as their fantastic Zune interface. To this day, there is no proper UI for hooking my PC to a TV and using it as a strict entertainment center. You gotta download Playnite/Emby , etc
I think you're sort of making my point for me in a roundabout way. We don't need our consumer computing devices to come out with new iterations every year. That's more down to the process people who listen to Wall Street's wanton cries of "QoQ growth for all of time must happen or else we will riot". They look at Cook and say "we have to copy that". Instead of following the gaming console trend (a new device every 4-5 years that was clearly several technological steps up from the previous console), they become addicted to releasing nearly identical products with a few marginal changes because that gets them nice quarterly numbers.
I'd rather own a device, use it a few years, and then upgrade when the product utility and usecase demands I need to.
And you can tell even if you dont know much about supply chain. Their whole product market segmentation and how every iteration is a price / component reuse for maximum profits.
It isn't about new product or magic as many claims. It is having the gut feeling, or taste, to say this feature will be in the new mid range, and this will be flagship only. At the expense of maximising profits. Right now the whole Apple just feels it is all about operating efficiency.
In the old days it was the exact opposite, as long as Steve Jobs thinks it is not Apple's core competency or others could do it better he is very much willing to pay for it. Keeping everything as slim and as tight as possible. Even when he knew it could save some money.
And a lot of designs and user experience just feels much more complex. It feels more Android or Windows with every update. The urge to ship features after features.
It is unfortunate. Apple used to be the The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. Now they feels very much the same as Google or Microsoft. With slightly better taste, fits and finish in their products.
I think the only thing still worthwhile at Apple is macOS but they have been on a killing spree trying to completely annihilate everything that made it good in the first place. In some ways it's still somewhat nicer to use than Windows but it matters much less now that their hardware prices have skyrocketed and the lineup only makes sense in a profit maximization strategy.
Their desktops do not make sense at the price they are sold at: what I would consider a minimum viable (16GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD) Mac Mini starts at 1200€ (but what you really want is the "Pro" 10 cores version at 1500€). The problem is that you can literally get a laptop that will perform similarly for the same price or even less money. You could say that the laptop has a bad screen (the one I checked had a recent OLED so that's doubtful) or won't last on battery or whatever but in comparison you basically get it for free.
Their laptop could be good but the design is not great and the pricing is just insane when you consider the market. The minimum viable pricing for a MacBook Air would be 1760€ and a MacBook Pro 2230€. At those prices you get very underwhelming CPU/GPU performance considering. For all the hype Apple Silicon gets, base versions of their chips are good for efficiency but when you consider overall performance it's not really a good deal. Again, what you really want is the "Pro" version, but it starts at 2.5K€ and at this point you realize that you could buy a more performant PC plus a decent laptop to carry around with about the same budget. Now macOS is nice, but at what price?
What a strange straw man that I can't connect to reality
What I've seen (on this site, on twitter, and on reddit) over those years was a reckoning that 10x employees aren't often worth the bullshit - their toxicity, that they may make others around them more than 10x UN-productive, and that our industry may have had a habit of treating these 10xers with kid gloves not caring the path of destruction they left of (and especially) female engineers.
Yes, I did see the occasional blog or tweet thread from some claiming that they didn't exist at all, but it was always immediately challenged because the concept is ridiculous. We've all worked with at least one 10xer (and by the way most of them WEREN'T toxic, but actually incredible, helpful, and generous).
This seems not true. I suspect one of many things Jobs and Cook have in common many tech leaders lack is "taste", a refined ability to curate well.
If you're ever in this management situation, you can try working the problem up the chain. (At least your own immediate manager, or possibly up and sideways, if you're empowered to do that.)
One of the times I did something like that, for a peer who was undervalued, and who'd confided how upset they were at the runaround they were getting. The person who could fix the situation was an exec 2-3 levels up. Since I was allowed to interface throughout the company on some things, I went and explained the situation to the exec, and something about the impact of this person. The exec agreed, and quickly unblocked HR and management to fix it.
Not just can, but must. That's the whole point of the team having a manager, to have someone defend them up there. When shit starts raining from above, you don't garnish it with platitudes to "weaken the impact" and pass it to your subordinates, you do your damn best to fight it.
In recent times, this has gotten to the point that I stop delivering early, and end up spending more time 'validating' scope/requirements than actually doing the work... simply due to the overhead of having my time minced by someone else's "best practice" beliefs.
That was a fib. I recall that first Mac mouse had two little (maybe 3mm diameter?) tabs underneath to support it, and they quickly wore away resulting in the mouse largely being unusable without gluing something to the bottom to stabilize it.
"Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
> HR kicked my evaluations back and said I needed to distribute my evaluations more “fairly.”
> “Fairly,” of course, meant “bell curve.”
> That caused a few outstanding employees to be undervalued and, as a result, under-rewarded.
So instead of bell curve, they should be using power law distribution.
Said to me by every single manager, for the reasons of not following a faulty process (a one that I even suggested to fix) or attending the usual silly and useless meetings and always thought it’s a “me-problem” for being “anti-authority” despite over delivering every requirement with a very happy clients we had in a very short period of time, I’m glad someone somewhere agreed with me for once, nice article. The question is, how do you communicate that in the hiring process to eliminate any potential management style that will cause a headache for both of you later, do you just say I’m pain to manage?
Also you wrote that you suggested a change in the process, not that it was accepted.
Hence the obsession with process, and why it somehow works.
By "information" I'm hand-waving around concepts such as code, organizational hierarchy, processes, lessons learned, sales pipelines, industry connections, brand awareness, etc.
I will toss out some claims: the human mind, operating in the context of an organization with more stuff that already exists, will largely "anchor" on what is known. In an organization, people share common knowledge -- and people know this about each other. It shapes how they interact and what they think is worth doing and trying.
So, to put a finer point on it: To what degree will existing information provide a productive jumping off point for what needs to be done?
To the extent my simplifications above capture the core dynamic -- it would perhaps explain a lot: (a) why some pivots feel incredibly hard, while others feel easy; (b) why some teams evolve fluently while others struggle to modernize; (c) why some cash cows transition to adjacent profitable opportunities while others languish; (d) why the idea of "skunk works" is so compelling when rapid innovation is needed
Where his philosophy usually seems to break down (when others try to apply it) is positioning those two things at odds with each other. You absolutely need both once you reach a certain scale. You also need to ensure they don’t conflict with one another.
Imagine if he wasn't so short sighted the value of the firm he could have created over the long term.
PS. I think you're also right, in that I don't see any aversion to process in Jobs, I see an aversion to contentless process people. Jobs loved a quality process.
You know what makes a great chef? Mise en place, technique, and taste. Organization, preparation, skills, and that indelible knowledge of what looks and tastes good and why. The best chefs don't focus "on process" or "on content", they have to do both, or the dishes will either be inconsistent or mediocre.
Absent reliable way to surround ourselves with superstars we rely on process to lift the average for everyone.
The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist.
This was my experience in (large co).
I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC.
Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output.
Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star.
Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.”
Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there.
A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity.
The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.”
You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star.
That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.
I work in the public service where accountability has been transformed from a concrete thing (who is responsible for this?) to a 'value'. So the org chart is set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, the processes are set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, but if you point this out managers will retort that it doesn't matter, because what's really important is that everyone personally commits to the value of accountability which in turn will create a culture of accountability. They've replaced performance reviews with workers writing about how much they embrace accountability (of course the absence of genuine reviews helps ensure no-one can be held accountable for poor performance).
I'm increasingly of the opinion that any manager who talks at length about culture is a moron. It's a fuzzy catch-all that can be invoked to explain anything without understanding anything, of great value to the modern manager who typically understands nothing.
I've seem this a lot in companies adopting agile. That was always a cabal that had all the real power and the benefits than come with it, but suddenly because of "self-organizing", "flat hierarchy", there was no more any more or less formal path for ascending in the organization.
During the first years of the scrum frenzy, the figure of the tech lead almost disappeared in a lot of companies.
This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.
You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff.
This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them.
The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same.
This is the type i admire and want to work with.
Been there, done that, it's a career dead-end.
I’m sure if the lecturers cared they could have managed it properly but they didn’t I don’t know of any who did.
> Price’s law says that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
But that doesn't match the real world. In the real world managers dig into that all the time. They develop understandings of the performance of individual team members. If they don't, we call that a pathology and it's their fault because they have all the tools and time they need to do it. Certainly many fail at that and there are plenty of complaints about that in this discussion, but it isn't inevitable the way it is for a school grader.
I see no way to resolve this gap, and as a result, my recommendation, for all the zero good it will do, is that schools need to just accept they can't really simulate a group project and stop assigning them.
For those stuck in them in school, I have no particular advice. I'm not sure what I would do myself if I were placed in such a scenario again. Probably just grumble and be the guy doing the project again.
But for those in a work situation, you have a reasonably good chance of having an option you may not realize: Document, document, document! Document that your current task is blocked on $SLACKER's work. Document that you added unit tests to $SLACKER's work around your needs and they failed and you sent it back. Document that they broke the unit tests to make them pass and it still doesn't meet your needs. Document, document, document.
There's two reasons for this: One, it covers your own bum. You will find that even if at first you may be pushed into being a "team player" there does generally come a point where SLACKER needs to contribute something meaningful themselves to be of any value. Second, to get an employee fired nowadays, you need a solid documentation trail. If your manager does not or can not make one, well, they don't really have to. You can go a long ways towards providing HR with one yourself.
I don't guarantee that will work in every situation, but I would suggest that you not let your cynicism block you from at least trying here. And to be honest, if that just completely doesn't work and you are in a situation where HR is just perfectly OK with a paper trail of documented lack of performance over a period of time, well, maybe that's a signal it's time to leave. Even a cynic can see that paper makes the world go round and you can often turn that to your own advantage with just a bit of effort.
Regarding improving group projects in schools: This is not a good idea, but a thought: school groups have rotating “managers” that are made to mainly coordinate and communicate with the professor. This mirrors the dynamic in industry, but I can see it becoming a nightmare, far worse than the current paradigm.
Also, documentation is a great idea, and I think pull requests are useful way to track this and improve the situation - by taking action to fix a problem and create an artifact of the action (with comments on the why).
(the $SLACKER env var is a nice touch. The goal is to have never get defined, but alas.)
What's worse is that your metric is as likely to be out of sync as code comments. If you're lucky you can notice that a) a new "10x" is actually adding value in a way you never thought to measure, and b) you already spent that 10x money on the employees whose "10x" is hacking your metrics as targets. More likely, you just notice "a" and not "b."
I think the outrage over this goes all the way back to the Greeks. IIRC Plato had a Socratic dialogue about the politician generally beating the expert in debate because the politician is an expert in persuasion. "Being an engineer" isn't a solution because, as you imply, at some point the engineer has to pay the bills. And it's at that point they are out of their element and subject to the politician who specializes in persuading engineers to do things.
If I were wrong, engineers would have long used a web-of-trust to publicly post their salaries (or perhaps anonymized statistics derived from them) to ensure companies aren't taking advantage of anyone at scale.
Edit: clarification
But when a system does bother with individual differences in contribution, inequality is seen as necessarily unjust. I don’t see how you can live through a group project and believe that. Some people contributing much more than others or being much more competent than others is eminently plausible! That’s how most things go!
Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?
Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves.
Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.
All the old management are still in place despite several ceo changes and it has become the poster child for failed big company.
you can even read the glass door reviews. Thousands of posts say the same thing I am saying: The bad people gang up on the good people and that’s why I left.
Then he left, started a 30 person company, got frustrated, quit and built another game entirely from scratch doing all the art direction and sold millions then retired.
One person.
[Edit: I was trying to make a joke reference but after reviewing the facts, no it doesn't look like the person referenced was Chris Sawyer of Rollercoaster Tycoon fame. He could fit the description though]
I guess this can varies per company. It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company. After all, “In The Land of The Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.”
This is really common in many European companies. Most developers are doing the bare minimum and it’s common for the department to be carryover by a single guy that is passionate by software development.
My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.
Or they just plain don't care about software engineering and just do bare minimum for salary.
It is extremely hard to be a superstar in a dinosaur company, if we are talking about software development.
The thing to consider is called "technical debt." You will not believe what can be accumulated through years if technical debt is not addressed. And usually it is not properly addressed, of course.
If management expect people to just listen to the superstar directly it’s terrible, as the superstar has no time to do the actual work and is expected to lead instead.
That is the easiest way to kill talent, and strange enough most people are encouraged to go this way to grow within the company.
The best thing management can do is to listen to Steve Jobs: "the best managers are the great IC who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because nobody else is going to be able to do as good as jobs as them". [Youtube ID QplyFXgIx7Q].
I feel you need pace setters but not excessively reward individual heroics.
Are you sure you've got a "superstar" there?
I think the term ought to be reserved for people who truly do a lot of good work, and not the many varieties of people who manage to make it look like they're doing lots of good work. Which absolutely exist, and need terminology to talk about them, and sharing strategies to deal with them is a good thing to do. But while I'm sure there's a non-zero set of people who are both superstars and very good at giving the appearance of doing a lot of work and being very political about it, I doubt there are many. That's a very particular order off the metaphorical menu of attributes.
I would expect a real superstar to be happy to find that you can carry a meaningful portion of the load. There is always more work to do than can be done. Being able to not do some of it allows them to focus somewhere else.
A real superstar would empower the team with that extra sprinkle of confidence so they can tackle the cool projects and succeed. They should be SWAT, not Mayor.
I’m sorry you feel this way and you should bring this up with your manager.
How do they get to "take" as an IC.
Because when the "team" undoubtedly fails, it falls on shoulders of the superstar to fix it.
So what you have isn't a superstar. That's a jerk who will burn out fast and your management isn't responsive enough.
Yeah this is spot on. My time in engineering has taught me that the world is falling apart, always and forever. There is a relentless decay eating everything around you and it's often only the heroic acts of surprisingly few high-quality people that keep it going to tomorrow.
Those people are rare, perhaps around 0.5-5% of the population or less depending on where you draw the boundaries. But they can be found in all different walks of life. I know one that was a UPS driver for 30 years. Not a remarkable profession, but he is a remarkable guy. School was about the only thing he wasn't a high-performer in with the exception of high-school sports. But he can solve basically any problem. Even those out of his depth, because he knows when something is out of his depth and he also knows who to pull in to consult. He knows EVERYONE and everyone that knows him owes him a favor because he uses his undying energy and hard work to help them all. At work, they begged him to become a manager but he refused the position over and over. But they would screen every new hire through him to see if they were worth keeping. When something would go wrong, they called him. I remember one instance when there was an interruption to the entire local area fuel AND power supply and the warehouse was therefore out of operation because their backup generators didn't have enough fuel. So... they just called him in the middle of the night and by God, he had the problem solved by 4 am that day and still showed up for work. His breadth of skill and knowledge is also incredible, but I'll save the reader some time and omit those stories.
Despite being rare gems of people, you paradoxically seem to run into these people everywhere because they tend to be so prolific and well connected. Effective managers learn to just funnel their problems through these people with enough lead time to keep the whole team operational.
The corrosive forces of the ocean combined with what-ever-that-is growing on your bottom hull reminds you it’s a constant battle between human nature and Mother Nature.
Then the talent gets fed up and leave, leaving a mere "cover band" behind, unable to replicate the magic beyond what an average amateur band could do.
Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.
some enterprising manager realizes this, makes up a new job title (that sound important) to justify the 4x salary, and thus lead to job title inflation as other people sees such a title earning high.
It's also easier to book a high fixed cost than a high ongoing cost.
So 1.5x would be a steal in comparison.
Pure employee costs are more in the 1.2 - 1.3x range (Europe). That is 30% on top of the gross salary for employer taxes, health insurances etc.
To start: everyone pays 34.75% of mandatory social contribution, even if you are on minimum wage. Government tricks people saying the contribution is "only" 11% but charges the other 23.75% from the employer.
So if a company pays 1000 eur to "you" (remember a chunk goes straight to government and skips you, but they are still spending that to pay you) you get 652.5 euro. Or 65% roughly. And that is only the social contribution part.
The average income tax for a tech worker is around 20%. Thus you get instead 500 euro flat.
Thus a Portuguese company to hire a tech worker would literally spend the double of your taxless wages just to hire you and pay the income taxes and social contribution. Then if you factor all other potential expenses things get even sillier.
Having a ssalary cap on certain positions, but paying top dollar for external consultants doing the same is very very common.
As an external consultant you are - to some extent - outside the hierarchy, so the usual rules don't apply.
When companies get really big and dysunctional they start to treat their customers as if they're the bottom of the hierarchy. Which is how you get all finds of corporate outrages.
That is, if the company hires you, they hire you (in theory) forever. But if they contract with you, that's usually for the duration of the contract - a few months. A higher rate but for a short time is easier to justify than a slightly lower, but still high, rate forever.
Because of lack of benefits, don't have to go through unions to fire ect.
Same reason you pay higher on a short term apartmentlease.
I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.
In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment.
Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.
Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.
Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand.
Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.
My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.
The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes.
I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it.
Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with.
Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.
However, what is the better option here?
A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs.
B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs.
My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.
Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more.
Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity.
I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use.
God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.
On the other hand, I’m more than willing to accept my 35% lower compensation to have a full time job than I know I could make if I went independent.
On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well, but with kid on the way I am worried I won't be able to find clients...
Not getting paid? Are you trying to break into an industry with an unpaid internship or is this a hack-a-thon side project?
I don't understand how structuring an independent contractor offering will get you paid by the same folks who aren't paying you at the moment.
Doesn't sound like it would solve your issue.
That you need to hire 29 instances of the worst and least talented garbage to push just one lonely little sad superman?
Take any company, and grade it (personally!) on both "how ideologically driven is their mission" and "how productive are they"; eight times out of ten it'll correlate. New companies like OpenAI ("we're inventing machine intelligence"; strong ideology/mission); extremely productive. Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, extremely strong, important mission, extremely productive. Some smaller companies like 37Signals, very ideologically/personality driven, very productive. There's even a few big tech companies left, like Cloudflare, that have strong, coherent mission drive ("Building A Better Internet") and have productivity to match it.
One counter-example (and why its, like, eight out of ten): Microsoft. No one has any clue what Microsoft's mission is. That product factory still churns out more new stuff than anyone on the west coast.
Those two paragraphs are 100% connected, because roughly the only way to mitigate (not eliminate) the risk of superstars leaving is high, coherent mission drive. "High" means "its clear, its communicated, its meaningful" and "coherent" means "its practiced, its demonstrated, its genuine". Compensation is another way, but the problems with compensation are (1) you will lose the compensation fight with competitors eventually, (2) it selects for actors that aren't interested in anything except compensation, and (3) it breeds complacency/retirement without simultaneous high+coherent mission drive (Nvidia's problem right now).
Oxide [1] is an interesting case-study in mitigating some negative impacts of high compensation; "Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location."
It just comes down to: Poor Leadership. If the product is boring, if leadership can't coherently communicate mission, direction, value, etc; superstars aren't going to join or stay for very long. Everything else is window dressing. In the absence of that, the most effective way to maintain continuity of operations is normalization and "the bell curve".
Also: If you find yourself believing "well, some companies just don't operate in an area where high mission drive is even possible, not every company is on the bleeding edge of AI CryptoTech", just stop. I don't care what you're doing; building a high, coherent mission is always possible. Amazon's mission is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. That's a freakin awesome mission that would resonate with a ton of superstars, and its a mission that every damn company could have, if their leadership chooses it and is high quality enough to live it.
I must say that I have heard that "hit by a bus" argument once too many.
What I see:
1 People very rarely get hit by a bus.
2 When someone leaves, two things happen.
A) Someone else, very often previously anonymous, becomes the new rock star.
B) It turns out that super important thing that guy was expert on was not so important after all...
You never know the type of employee and their motives for leaving until they do. Some are excellent and spend two weeks documenting and knowledge sharing. Some take a two week vacation. This point is orthogonal to superstar.
And I am speaking from my experience and yours is different.
Just that I have felt lately that the "hit by a bus" card has been played too often close to me and it makes progress slow down.
And I feel that when it does happen, organizations are much more resilient than the worst case that is often painted.
(Changing subject) I am actually pretty intrigued by case 2A in my post, I have seen this often and sometimes it has been me.
What causes someone to step up and more importantly what prevents them from doing so before? Because it means that many orgnanizations have this as an untapped resource.
What should they do to release that resource earlier?
E.g. How much active knowledge sharing on the superstar's domain of expertise, and even process, is happening? A luncheon once a month? Its not enough. How much time is the superstar allowed to spend documenting? Is the rest of the team actually reading it? Is active mentorship happening on the team?
Versus: Create a top-down process, make everyone follow the process, invent hypotheticals as to why the process matters, product factory, etc.
Documentation is good but sometimes i feel like there is a need for something more.
Maybe the previous guy needs to move out of the way. Maybe his way of doing code reviews is discouraging - how important is it really to do everything like it was wired in his brain? Or just let go of the idea of how the code is structured?
I take mentoring seriously since this is my way of adding force multiplication without having to become a manager.
In my "big tech company", there's a thorough (and I think overall fair) evaluation process, and a very high performer can earn a significant amount of money, e.g. 10x the salary of a junior. People are also strongly incentized to deliver through bonuses and stock refresher.
I'm not denying that what you describe exists in some (most?) companies, but there are tons of companies out there, and it's also up to employees to do their homework and find places that suits their values and ambitions. They do exist!
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
If your corporation is not compensating you enough to deal with the additional headache of politics, I'd try working for a smaller company.
Idea is that they will outlive any human life or it would be possible to detach from any single person.
There is of course cost attached of not being fully efficient, but that is irrelevant in bigger scale.
The real challenge is how can organisations best leverage super stars to achieve great things. It's difficult because managers have to be smart and confident, and the super star can't be allowed to undermine others.
The high prevalence of insecure managers and arrogant super stars makes this hard to do.
I can't imagine you can sustain the technical excellence over decades in places like Nvidia, Apple, Nintendo, ... without having a very robust process of protecting high-performance deeply technical people from wider organisational politics.
In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office.
Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up.
This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?
No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them.
A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon.
Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.
I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad.
The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.
- Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs
- the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys
What do you think?
To your question: You can always saddle a 'rockstar' with enough negative-value players to result in poor overall performance. You've contriving an irrelevant situation -- also one where you've put 53 rockstars,[1] against a bunch of highschoolers plus one rockstar. Just about every player on the Dallas cowboys, except maybe the kicker/punter would drag an average highschool to the state championship.
[0]And we all know how that has turned out over the last 20 odd years.
[1]Rockstar-ship is situational/relative - the backup RB on the cowboys is a scrub in the NFL. He would also be the best highdchool player in the country by a large margin (aka a rockstar).
Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.
I observed something like this, or at least I thought I did. With many more years of reflection, and there were hints along the way as it happened in realtime, I came to realize that the contribution of those I had written off as non-performers and dead weight was actually higher than I had estimated and difficult to actually quantify. My hope for you is that you one day reach similar epiphanies. Because your attitude that some are much better than others and need to be compensated out of proportion is quite toxic. Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.
It's whoever makes the coffee. Because without the coffee, a whole lot less work gets done.
Don't forget whoever replaces the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, either.
Second, I think if you genuinely have a complaint about dead weight it's probably better to hire selectively, cautiously and consciously rather than evaluate staff as sub-par after that point. Yes that's difficult to do especially with the first point, and it won't be perfect either.
Specifically about this:
> Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.
"Processes" are for factories. Diluting is good for factories, cogs.
For some type of 'creationary' work, it's also fine.
For me a "superstar" is a friendly capable coder, who simplifies, teaches and learns in a feedback loop. They are indeed very rare.
I have often wondered about this myself, and believe there's some nuance to acknowledge:
- Yes, it is absolutely the case that individuals often carry teams. It does sometimes feel like they're subsidizing others' salaries.
- There's an old adage in advertising that goes: we know 50% of our budget is wasted on ineffective ads, we just don't know which 50%. The same probably holds true for organizations allocating wages.
- People go through different phases of their lives, where they can devote more or less energy to work. This fact may lend credence to a compensation structure that's based on bonuses and equity versus salary. Flat salary bands seem to discourage meritocracy without this adjustment.
- Organizations themselves are also dynamic. Consider a small org seeded by a prolific worker. They make the org successful, so the org grows and necessarily dilutes the talent (i.e. reversion to the mean).
- Does an organization have an incentive to "slow down" it's most prolific workers so everyone else can keep up? Conversely, should they develop a culture that speeds everyone else up?
- Should / do prolific workers self-select into higher-performance organizations, e.g. after getting fed up being a big fish in a small pond?
- Team dynamics are undeniable; consider two prolific workers with different styles clashing.
I personally would love to work on a team of superstars who mesh, and can capture disproportionate value relative to large, slow, mediocre orgs. The hard part is finding one and keeping it together.