You see this across industries. Even Google, in the early days, was people working crazy hours, sweating the details, and just generally grinding. It is something like a law of nature that extraordinary results require extraordinary effort from extraordinary people.
That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.
If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
- not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one will pay for excellence of some services or goods
- being exceptionally good at something doesn’t guarantee someone will buy from you, people might just don’t like you or your branding
- there are bunch of other market forces that you have to overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95% on a single thing
Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).
The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.
and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?
If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?
Where's that discrepancy coming from?
Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.
The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.
Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.