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I have heard another version of this classification: people are either builders, or scalers, or optimizers, but rarely combine the traits. They are good for different stages of the company growth. Builders are good at the most risky and innovative stage from founding the company to getting first customers. Scalers know how to become big and profitable. Optimizers squeeze the juice and keep moats deep.

About 5 years ago, I had a conversation with my CTO that amounted to this. He told me paraphrasing, "I'm a one trick pony. I take companies from this size to this size and when I'm done, I move on to the next. I'm very good at this and I'm happy doing it." Plus he made a lot of money doing so. I'd worked with him at two companies and it clicked that he had a playbook and he ran that playbook at each new company. He refined the art of going from this stage a to stage b.

I really took it to heart and changed what I thought about career progression. I'm probably a builder/scaler I def get bored in the maintenance phase.

Maintenance/optimization is an interesting stage: on one side, there you mostly need to execute by playbooks rather than be creative. Is it boring? On the other side, it is the stage where you need the most skill and expertise: you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories. There you stand on the shoulders of giants and establish connection between today and many centuries of others experience. You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.

> You do need to innovate still, but that is now an intricate art of balance between not wrecking the ship and still being relevant. Is _that_ boring? I don’t know. I want to try it closer to my retirement.

It's probably experience bias but the maintenance phase orgs I have worked for were more like warehouses that kept systems on shelves and let them rot until all the customers bled away. These were mostly growth by acquisition PE companies. It was like working at a fruit stand selling only rotten fruit. We were never given time, budget, or resources for even basic modernization. Everything was firefighting. One team after acquisition, lost their devops team, and let their pipelines degrade over 5 years to the point they couldn't deploy anymore. I've seen on-prem solutions deployed 20 times to a VM across 50 VM's and called cloud. It took a weekend for the team to deploy (10-15 people because support had to manually test every env because it was so fragile). They also tend to attract and retain talent that is done learning and growing. I had an Ops Engineer at one of these orgs tell me in 2023 that no one told them they had to learn Docker. They know what they know, and they push back on anything new which in turn drives away engineers that do want change. Everyone knows it's broken but no one will commit any resources to fixing it. The business doesn't care as long as they are retaining.

It's minefield and even when they talk about how committed they are to change during the interview you walk into fortified silos and no support or budget to break the deadlock.

See, perhaps, explorer/villagers/town planners: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2023/12/how-to-organise-yoursel...

Clearly this basic idea crops up in numerous forms. Part of the point of this specific scheme is that it is circular: once a given thing has reached the town planner stage, it has become some combination of pervasive and dependable and well-understood, ready to be used as one of the foundations for future exploration.

>you actually need to know all those playbooks, and standards, and regulations, and best practices, and war stories.

The way I see it is these companies need it, but it is impossible to satiate that need, so they must find the next best thing.

If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole. It is also impossible to staff all those positions with top talent at scale.

Raw talent and engineering is replaced with heuristics and policies and red tape.

It becomes like sailors operating a ship made with forgotten technology. They each have superstitions and operational knowledge about their little part, but nobody has the ship schematics.

Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.

>If you have a project with 500 individual contributors or even just 50, it is impossible for one person, even geniuses, to understand and comprehend the whole.

It is impossible to know every detail, but it is certainly possible to understand and comprehend it. The ability to zoom out and zoom in is essential for senior leadership (even if some people appear unfit based on this criteria). Of course it works only if your organization is… ehm… organized and doesn’t look like a bunch of unicorns of all sorts and colors, so that you can extrapolate the methods of work of one team to another.

> Similarly, there probably isn't single person on the planet that could fully explain how a modern computer works in detail.

This will be the downfall of modern society. When nobody remains who understands all the tech we rely on it's only a matter of time before the whole house of cards comes down.

You have multiple people that understand different bits of tech. It's been that way for a while.

What's fneascinating is that build -> scale -> maintain is a similar lifecycle to a human: create and pivot quickly with fluid intelligence and high energy at first, then settle into your lane and grow, and then use your accumulated domain-specific knowledge and wisdom that no one else has, at a slower pace.

But the progression is not necessarily the same time scale for the product and the person. Maybe it was in the past, before computing.

I've been a builder for a lot of my life but the last 10 years I've worked as an optimizer. The interesting thing about that is the work and playbook I used in the past is more of just a standard industry practice now. I used to do an audit and find a ton of low-hanging fruit and go from there. Nowadays, there's a lot less to correct and I have to think in different ways to provide true value.

The Jobs, the Wozs and the Cooks.

I think there are only 2 types of people: those who buy into schemas that divide people into between 3 and 16 groups with cool names and those who don't.

Personally I also require those groups to include at least one special character.

Your schema doesn’t account for companies that only have a management tack or an ic track with no opportunity for someone to sometimes lead teams and sometimes make technical decisions. I think you’ll find it’s better if you simply encompass the natural numbers.

According to Gödel's incompleteness theorems, there never exists a complete set of types of people, because there’s always one more type — people writing about those types.

I think this explains the trouble at my current company. We're a couple years into the scaling phase and it's become clear that our CEO is a builder and doesn't know how to scale.

I don't think he understands that and there's really not anything I can do about it but move on.

There was a show (if someone has the reference please add it) where these business guys were discovering chefs and working to turn their restaurants in to franchises.

There was a huge wake-up call as they kept working with this brilliant chef who all but refused to write down recipes, share processes, or do anything but run his restaurant the way he always had. He just couldn’t see that going from restaurant to franchise was an entirely different thing than running a great restaurant.

If I remember correctly, ultimately despite a bunch of different creative approaches, they had to back off.

I think about that a lot when businesses want to go from building to scaling.

That's Kent Beck's 3X: Explore Expand Extract (there is a good video on it about his time at FB)

Just found the talk on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WazqgfsO_kY ). Thank you! It expanded on the basic idea of "cost of failure" very well. I've tried to argue his points with mixed success, but now I can point to a talk given by someone who cut his teeth at Facebook.

Heh. Kent Beck "cut his teeth" a little earlier than Facebook ...

(He wrote the Agile Manifesto and developed TDD while working at Sun in the 90s)

Absolutely. It's just that namedropping Meta / Facebook is more effective than Sun :(.

That is not good, because what Tesla needs is a much larger range of models. Minivans. Delivery trucks. A real pickup. Work trucks. The Semi.

What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

Tesla is basically a battery packager at its core business. The Tesla Semi represents a massive amount of demand for packaged batteries, and Tesla's model has the best prototype-demonstrated abilities. That is what the next ten years of the company is about at the core.

Elon needs to go. Give him the 56 billion, and then send him off his way to ruin Twitter which isn't important. Tesla is one of the most important companies in the world in terms of keeping the EV transition on the cutting edge and keeping the feet to the fire on the old ICE companies. Maybe the Chinese companies will take that up, but there is so much uncertainty in China now.

Tesla is taking too long to release models. It is NOT good at building. Their battery leadership is gone, CATL and other chinese companies raced past them.

The future of EVs is LFP and Sodium Ion, and then probably Li-S or Na-S. Tesla has no leadership in those, it's all China.

> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

There's a pretty compelling argument out there that an electric semi is currently not economically viable because the weight of the battery cuts into the weight the semi can haul without exceeding the gross vehicle weight limit on public roads. In this regard, it may be telling that Tesla's first customer was a company that sells potato chips - one of the lightest weight per volume products you can transport.

It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed.

I would say the biggest headache for Tesla in the semi space is that they were not first to market and there are multiple competitors shipping trucks now. And while Tesla has decent battery production, CATL makes way more and is evolving the technology much faster. Everyone else will just use those batteries. Maybe Tesla will too, if they keep trying to make the Semi a viable product.

> It may not completely offset the battery weight, but electric class 8 trucks have an additional 2000 pounds of GVWR allowed.

I wonder if they did a calculation to determine if this course of action will actually save more carbon emissions than it will cause in the form of road destruction and the need for refinishing them from the increased weight.

> What really disturbs me about recent Tesla communication is that the Semi is just not being mentioned.

It's not being mentioned because it's a dumpster fire.

It has delivery rates that today are 30% of their contractual obligations for 2017, seven years ago now.

Pepsi, Sysco, UPS and Walmart have or are all given up and gone to competitors.

Musk even implies that the outlook won't improve there. Blames battery availability, actually.

EV trucks should have a shoe-in for lot tenders, it works well with the recharge cycle, would work with drop in batteries, etc., but Musk wants his on the Interstate, regardless of feasibility.

He's also managed to convince the faithful that no-one else is doing or capable of doing commercial sized EVs, despite BYD having 60,000 electric buses operating, and others.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

If you haven't seen it before, you may find this interesting: https://medium.com/building-the-agile-business/a-structure-f...

Thank you for sharing this! I read this a long time ago and promptly lost the link, despite me coming back to the principles often.

Wow, great read. I'm 100% a Settler. What should I be doing career-wise to maximize this? Joining startups?

This is the PAEI model which is from the 1970s.

People are either Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, or Integrator.

It's a scale from E to P to I to A in order of early to late in the company lifecycle. There are even personality tests for this online.

Yeah I absolutely agree. The way it was told to me, there are 3 types of people: Commandos, soldiers and police. Commandos like cutting their own path through the jungle and going behind enemy lines to do something nobody thought possible. Soldiers work as a team to make a stable foothold. And after the area is secure, police keep the peace and deal with problems that come up.

The world will always ask commandos to stay around as soldiers and soldiers to stay around as police. But that’s not their role. They’re needed elsewhere.

I saw this with my own eyes back in college. A friend started a computing facility newsletter. Every Sunday he was up until dawn finishing the copy in it, and then Monday he would find a working printer and print copies. I think he was funding it himself for the first few months. One of the computing staff (the “student liaison”) fought him every step of the way. He was constantly being trouble, making it hard to distribute the newsletter. Telling him he couldn’t use the printer. Random stuff like that.

Well. My friend was reliable and 6 months passed. Every week the newsletter came out and it became part of life on campus. My friend moved on and guess who put up their hand to keep running it? It was the liaison. The same guy who had made it so hard to start in the first place. He’s just a born police man. I think deep down he loves maintaining the status quo. Once the newsletter was part of the status quo, he naturally took it on himself to keep it going.

Oh I love this analogy, thank you!

This is 100% true in my experience.

Founders are good at founding, which is generally a very shortsighted and aggressive activity.

At some point, the business needs stability. Founders that stick around too long often cannot make that transition and end up making long term success untenable.

I’ve heard it called “Founder’s Syndrome” when a founder can’t bring themselves to step away and hand their creation off to a better caretaker.

A company like Tesla needs stability if they want me to buy an expensive product like a car - whether it be $25K or $50K. Right now I'm shopping used EVs. Won't pick a Tesla b/c I keep my cars for 15+ years and I can't be sure that a Tesla will be affordable to own during that ownership. They may not even exist in 15 years. I'm pretty sure most of the other mainstream brands will be.

Same.

In fact my biggest worry is that the software will be abandoned and as cars age, edge case bugs will appear, but there’ll be no way to fix them.

There’s going to need to be a robust aftermarket for vehicle software.

Though, I don’t know if I’d trust some random EBay dongle or even Dorman to patch my drive-by-wire steering that’s been pulling to the left a bit in a 15 year old Tesla.

One person’s maintaining is another person’s building. There are definitely many many very competent people with a “builder” mindset that would get a kick out of building a good maintenance / service experience.

It’s simply that these things aren’t respected by…someone…or someones, and don’t get the attention they deserve from the people that could provide it.

Yes, maintainer deserve respect.

However, This is just wordplay redefining the concept building.

If the purpose is maintenance, it is maintaining.

> One person’s maintaining is another person’s building

IMHO, if you have a shitty harassing manager, you can switch from maintaining to being anti-work in a few months. And having a good manager can lift you from being a maintainer to being a tech lead at any company. This is a simple psychological trick that most companies have not figured out yet and it's very sad.

Management is hard and ICs often underestimate the difficulty.

Employees are diverse, and what works for one, doesn't work for another. Similarly, what ICs say will work and what actually works are usually very different.

To be fair, I think everyone underestimates the difficulty—including managers, the people that hire them, and the people who org companies to "require" a large number of people with these scarce skills.

While I agree ICs underestimate the difficulty, I think what ICs are usually responding to is that the managing isn't good. Whether that's because managing is difficult or because their manager is bad is in some sense not what matters. Those problem are the managers' job or the managers' managers' job.

For the record I wasn’t disparaging the maintainers.

In Tesla’s situation, they need more people with a maintenance mindset to sustain their company.

SpaceX has a nice mix of both.

I used to be like this but I think it's more like...why build something if you don't reap some of the benefits?

I've build several products for several companies / individual, some of them were hugely, hugely successful, and then I'd leave and build the next thing. I just got tired of it after a while. Now I hang around for a bit more maintenance and more often than not something cool comes along.

Assuming that framework is true - which I’m not challenging at all -, why would you need to _fire_ the builders, instead of pivoting them to new greenfields projects - as I assume Tesla has many. Unless your CEO isn’t a maintainer/optimizer himself?

> he said (I'm paraphrasing) most people are either builders or maintainers, and rarely both.

What a great comment, and it applies to so many things and situations I’ve been in.

This is a very valuable observation ("builders" vs "maintainers") along with the comments below this.

> I'm surprised to see that they've gutted the supercharger team because it seems like the ultimate "services" sector where they're in better shape than anyone else to make basically free "services" type money from ALL EVs in coming years with NACS.

Yeah, this did seem surprising to me as well. This is one of those mailbox money type of systems. However, I'm guessing they've realized that maintaining the infrastructure is something they do not want to do. So instead of running the network, they should just make the chargers, or license them for others to build. Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company, so these ideas seem right up their alley

> Tesla is pretty much the quintessential example of a rent-seeking company

This seems impossible. How is it doing rent-seeking?

My understanding is they were offering subscription services. I could have misremembered that. I know other makers were considering the same type of thing.

There are only two subscriptions that Tesla offers: FSD and Premium Connectivity.

And since you still have the option to purchase FSD outright, I don't consider the subscription option as rent-seeking.

With Premium Connectivity, the way I see it, it's necessary to actually cover the costs associated with it. For those unaware, Premium Connectivity, you don't get any video/audio streaming services in the car, and the navigation can only use bare maps rather than satellite imagery. Note that these limitations don't apply if you instead tether to a mobile WiFi AP, such as your phone. The $10/month pays for the extra data your car uses on the mobile network, which could be a LOT of data if you watch video streaming while supercharging frequently.

Unless Tesla is getting a sweetheart unlimited data deal from some carrier, there are probably some people that actually cost Tesla money from streaming a ton of video. But someone like me, who drives only ~5 hours/month, I'm probably not using much data from the audio streaming.

There are more. In the US, there's Tesla Electric for home charging at a fixed rate. Then there is the Supercharger membership for non-Tesla owners for a reduced rate per kWh.

Subscription services aren't rent-seeking. Why would subscription services be bad in the way that rent-seeking is?

Look up "rent-seeking".

It is too bad we cannot come up with a better name, so people do not confuse it with everything else we call rent.

Anytime someone is trying to keep their hand in my pocket with continuous payments for something used to be a one time payment rather than offer the same but as a service is rent seeking to me. Am I confused on the definition?

The pejorative term, in the economic sense, tends to be reserved for rents obtained by gaming the system, rather than the usual kind that charges for use of property or capital.

Example: a utility company lobbies for a law requiring utilities to charge a junk fee.

Non-example: I charge someone to live in my spare bedroom.

Tesla is offering use of something they built (Superchargers, self-driving software, etc.) in exchange for a fee. They aren't gaming the system to force anyone to pay. You might not like the pricing model, but there's nothing economically wrong with it.

What would be an example of that? Most that I can think of involve a company (cough BMW cough) offering a feature they used to sell outright, for a monthly fee. The fee being much lower than the outright price of that feature. They're still offering something of value, in this case convenience and lower cost (if you don't want it all the time, buying it incrementally may well be cheaper than buying it outright; Tesla FSD comes to mind as a contemporary example).

I think the problem most people have with the BMW trick is that they include the feature physically, but disable it. That does almost smell like rent seeking, but I think it does not quite get there. Manufacturers routinely hold back a bit and don't deliver maximum capability. For reasons like emissions, or longevity, whatever. This isn't much different IMO, if you're not paying anything for it then the fact that they included it anyway is immaterial.

Probably the most common kind of rent everyone thinks of, property rental, is also not rent-seeking. There is value in what is being provided.

To go back to a car analogy, it would be like BMW engaging the brakes on your car and then charging you a fee release them so you could drive (even better, making it legally required to pay the fee in order to drive on public roads). They're not providing any value at all, and then demanding money for it.

Yes, that's not rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is basically collecting money without offering any service or product in return. It does not benefit the economy, in contrary to profit-seeking, which is what Tesla is doing.