Managing High Performers
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With the reliable incompetence of the average job, we shouldn't ever expect this kind of rational fair compensation. Really, we should be seeing truly talented people making an exodus away from what is called a socially appropriate job. Due to there being a gross monopoly, right now, on economic resources (led by the dictatorship of midwits).
What keeps a sufficiently paid high performer around, usually, is a personally rewarding and comfortable work environment. What that means can vary quite a lot though, making it hard to summarize in blogspam and short comments.
Set them on a task, give them a few constraints as needed, and act as a bulldozer to remove blockers as they come to you with them. That's roughly the management a high performer needs in my book. Make sure you listen to them when they complain about something, and fix it within reason. Or explain why you cannot. Don't let penny wise pound foolish stuff fester. Advocate for merit based raises and bonuses - they are making you look good so they should be your first priority when expending political capital. Make sure higher ups and the rest of the org knows about their accomplishments. Simple stuff!
So I'd say, pay us all what we are worth, and pay the high performers proportionally more.
In our specific industry, innumerable people are earning high compensation as part of companies and teams that have relatively little revenue (if any) and may very well collapse before turning a profit. Should they not be paid until their work actually makes some money? What if it doesn't?
"Worth" is pretty tricky in salaries, but tech workers happen to have very very little to complain about when it comes to compensation right now. The labor fight for them (us) is real but exists almost entirely on other fronts.
Just become a shareholder, share the upside and share the downside. Don't have the balls? Be an employee, get a nice risk-free sum every month and live a worry-free life.
(Yeah I know being an employee isn't entirely without worries, but it's nothing compared to being a founder/shareholder.)
I always forget that all people, regardless of their capital, can "just become a shareholder".
Can't do it? Then you have to share with sales, marketing, accounting, tax consultants, finance, auditors, lawyers, internal IT, HR, post-sales account managers, customer support, office managers, other engineers - and of course the people who keep it organized, and the people who took a risk and funded it. Seems fair to me.
Consider the opportunity cost of providing capital: if I invested my capital into NASDAQ100 accumulating ETF, I could reasonably expect 10-15% of yearly tax-free[0] profit stored in a safe asset that can be liquidated at any time. Potentially much more profit - last few years were great (20-40% p.a.). You have to give me more if you want me to risk my capital in a custom illiquid and unregulated over the counter deal, and I mean a lot more.
[0] In my country if you hold an asset for 3 years, you don't pay capital gains tax - this doesn't apply to dividends or any other form of income such as interest or rent. But the accumulating ETFs are fully tax free after 3 years - including the dividends and the gains. You just sell when you need money, no need to "reinvest" manually.
I co-founded my first startup when I was 16, as soon as I reached the lower age limit for being a company shareholder in the UK - I'm not from the UK, but I wanted it and so I found a way. If a 16 year old kid with acne and 300 euro in their wallet can do it, any adult professional can.
Yeah it's a load of risk, you work crazy hours, the stress is insane and sometimes you end up paying instead of earning - so don't be surprised that nobody will share the upside if you don't share the risk. It's not for everyone. But anyone can, if they actually wanted.
Foolish me for not just becoming a shareholder. I definitely had the spare time between the $7k/year I was making to take that risk and not die of starvation.
Your world would be great if I had a guarantee of food, water, a bed, basic medicine, etc. I'd love to have had the ability to throw my time at a risky innovative project. But, I didn't. If I had, and that project failed, I would have literally died. Downsides are too big in this capitalist world for anyone to just become a shareholder.
You said that you want to get all profit you made for the company - that's only possible if it's your company. If you don't want that, that's fine - but don't say the option isn't available.
(Even non-profits etc are part of the market)
I also disagree that "an organization" (noun) implies anything other than "a group of people" as described in dictionary. An organization can exist without any planned structure - doesn't stop it from being an organization. In my teenage years I was part of few "hacker" groups (in the HN sense of the word) - we tinkered with computers and had a website with cool stuff, all under our 1337 H4X0R-esque name and logo. We definitely were an organization, but we really didn't plan any structure at all. We just liked tech.
See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organization
I wonder if non-religious subcultures like that can last very long though
The capitalist market system is really only a few hundred years old! If you believe Meiksins Wood, she puts it at about the mid 1700s, others put it a little later.
And even then, it took quite some time to reach the rest of the globe.
We've had non-capitalist market economies, anarchist economies, communist economies (of various flavors), gift economies, and many other ways of organizing people.
Ask the folks who run Food Not Bombs about whether they are 'organized by the market'. :D
Don't forget that no all companies can pay what they're worth... most companies don't.
What did they want me to do?
Get stuff out of their way, so they could move as fast as they were capable of moving.
I was happy to do that, and we had a great relationship.
The issue is, many times high performers just aren’t aligned with what needs doing, and by not-managing them, inexperienced managers create a world where you have tons of “high performance” arriving absolutely nowhere. You see this at every bloated organization (in particular at big tech).
I have no doubt that I'm not living up to my potential. I don't see any way to get there given my disability and lack of real coaching.
The problem is that companies often promote folks with excellent technical skills into people centric roles like an EM. Sometimes you get lucky and they are naturally good at the stuff. But more often than not, they really struggle. It's a conundrum. If you hire someone who nails it on the people stuff but is weaker on the technical side then they aren't able to make informed decisions.
I've been head of eng before. It's a hard job and I ultimately switched jobs to go back to IC work. I took the coaching aspect seriously when I was in the role though. I think ultimately you need to understand what your report wants and give them projects, feedback, and resources to achieve those goals. The big caveat being that sometimes the role that person is looking for isn't available. You can't have an entire team of principle engineers for example. So another aspect is to be clear about what is and isn't possible in terms of career path at your co. and try to find other incentives like pay etc to keep them happy. YMMV of course.
I mentor a few juniors and CS students outside of work and it's rewarding, but it frequently makes me wish I had a mentor of my own as well, ideally someone with ADHD who could give me specific advice. I guess all we can do is be the change we want to see in the world, and to stay vigilant against bureaucratic systems.
My advice is to figure out exactly where you want to be and make no compromises on getting there. It can be difficult navigating politics with ASD, but over time it can become one of your greatest assets as you pay more attention to it than the average person. I know this seems like a vague generality, but without knowing specifics all I can offer is general advice.
Aristotle would disagree.
As someone who is currently in that role I expect my managers to know where the limits lie and defend them against other higher ups, departments etc. And that means there should never be a long period of over-straining these resources.
At my company we recently had three product managers leaving because they were forced to do someone else's job.
In general, I feel that the article is geared towards making the high performer work harder and ignoring his often legitimate complaints. It does not address the question why high performers sometimes get irritable. The reasons can range from people intriguing against them with lies to being underappreciated.
"Cutting off the oxygen" is a one-sided and primitive measure.
This one stuck out at me too. We now have "architect" roles, and one of them was assigned to our group, having never even looked at our legacy codebases before, and during a meeting my response to what he wanted was pretty close to what's in this post - "that doesn't make sense / isn't a good idea". I didn't have a good on-the-spot explanation at that moment, it came from years of experience working with this legacy system, that I had to later figure out how to summarize all of that and put that intuition into words.
We basically bought out a ton of A- to A+ players from the rest of the industry and there are many high performers developing entire modules of core functionality themselves with a team of juniors and contractors supporting them. I also have a hunch they make $350-$750k.
John Carmack is not a “high performer.” He’s in the vanishly small <0.001%. We all know his name, and what he did and where he works.
Most people here just confuse high output with actual high performers.
Google no longer is able to place high performers because the current elite class of execs either see them as a threat or narrative disruptors.
Likely you never climbed high enough to see this.
Some are just nasty politicians that produce neither quality nor quantity.
Also you sound new to the company. Also just naive.
This is the basic unsolvable quandary everyone ignored at Google during my 10 years there.
What these silly advice columns actually are selling is “how to drain over producers until you can discard them”
Some of my best managers weren't really as technical as I was, or were experts in completely different domains.
The job of a manager isn't being a "better developer", it's to remove blockers and isolate reports from annoyances, so that they can do their best work.
Nobody, not even the best, is perfect. Even if they are perfect today, things constantly change, and they need to grow to accommodate change. A good manager will have different context (e.g., from being in more meetings than high performers have capacity for) and be able to synthesize information for them. They will see what is working for other high performers more deeply and share that. They will be a good sounding board. They will be someone who can listen. They will be someone who will be honest about what they are seeing. And they will know when to get themselves and others out of the way.
Also, part of being a great high performer is learning how to collaborate with a manager on growth. A manager can't do nearly as much to help if the high performer is not being reflective, looking for opportunity, willing to change / grow, and being vulnerable enough with the manager to share all of that. People who are really good at this can get more out of all but the worst managers.
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of terrible managers just getting in the way. But there are great managers too, even those who weren't the highest performers as ICs.
You wrote a lot here and got the metaphor entirely wrong at a base level. The NBA is a tournament of entirely high performers.
But you don’t. Like most on this forum these days it’s low Level Randos commenting with little insight or knowledge
This is kitchen table economics talk.
High performers will be good enough to fundamentally question leadership decisions at an exec level and will have good reasons to. They will not just he fast at their work. They will be so good at it that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation.
High output just does the work you assign them well.
I've managed multiple people like that and had them request weekly one-on-ones with me years after I retired (I gladly do it because they are amazing to talk with). I was a highly successful IC for almost 25 years, but nowhere near their level. It turns out some people can coach / manage / mentor well above their own levels.
I mention all that because my style had a lot in common with who you are responding to. Nowhere did they say that their reports get 1% ahead of their own abilities and stop there - there is no ceiling.
> You likely again have never seen a true high performer
I'm not sure why you think you know what everyone else has experienced. Isn't it possible that your experience is less than universal?
I’ve seen hundred million dollar retention packages. Not random engineers getting 100k more because they made a c suite happy once.
Also a x billion dollar company amounts to maybe What a few hundred people.
Come on you’ve not seen the major league even yet.
No one has. ;)
> [You] are confusing them for high output.
Not really. I agree that high performance is more than just high output. When I said this:
> My job is to make sure they have clarity on the team and organizational goals, make sure my management has visibility and confidence in our team, and create a healthy, high trust environment that allows my team members to work at their best.
I was thinking specifically about empowering them to be effective across the management hierarchy. That's the point of creating clarity around goals: so that team members can make autonomous decisions that don't rely on me to be the arbiter of quality/truth/whatever. I'm going to describe the target, not prescribe the path. And yes, even that description of the target is open to reevaluation. Facilitating healthy communication and bringing clarity is one of the fundamental purposes of the management role, in my opinion. As an organization grows the sheer number of conversations happening becomes too much for everyone to keep track of. Managers should function as clearing houses for important communication (not bottlenecks) so that other don't have to spend all of their time doing it. But the purpose of this is to make sure that people that have the skills/context/responsibility/ability have everything at the ready.
It's also why I said
> [I expect they] eventually grows to be better at their job than I am at their job
High-trust management is in many ways a different and orthogonal role. But you likely have never seen a truly high-trust manager.
If the high-performer is "so good [..] that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation," great! Let's promote them to Staff/Principal/Distinguished and have them report directly to the VP/C-suite, whatever.
Why not help them find and keep balance? We get to be excellent because we care and want to do the work well. Always mindlessly pushing for more is advocating for burning out your best people. Yes we want to grow but sometimes we need rest and further, that rest and proper balance is key to getting the best results.
This means that my duties as CTO or lead might be more spread out, that I have to work extra hours to feel like I'm getting enough personal coding time after factoring in administrative work, but it's worth it for me because my entire team moves faster and writes more robust software.
Unblocking someone doesn't mean doing someone's work for them, it means being a mentor, understanding their problem, and providing surgical assistance while also teaching them the same process you used to arrive at the solution.
I've had coworkers push back on this style before, opting sooner to fire employees for not immediately being key players. Meanwhile, I've cultivated some tight-knit teams where everyone is in sync and motivated to work and assist one another, regardless of skill level. Over time, the culture matures and the team is capable of managing more problems on their own.
I completely agree that when the high performer jumps to “let me just do it” it creates a negative multiplier to the team as most of the work will be only understandable by that one person and the rest of the team can do less than one unit of work.
Which is why it is very important for high performers to either know how to work in a team, or be assigned work where they can just do their things on their own.
It's one thing to mentor, pair, give advice, review PRs, review designs.
It's a very different thing when you have high performers jumping in to finish someone else's work all the time.
And IME: most companies prefer #2, because it's faster. Bus factor be damned.
Why don’t tech companies generally employ coaches? Yes you can get an “executive” coach, but not widely and really depends on the culture for the perceived purpose. Coaches aren’t widely available for helping people using (and not abusing) their brain’s gifts every day.
The same reason tech companies generally don't spend money training their employees, etc.
My experience with high performers is they will ask for guidance when they need it. You don't need to offer it to them.
Worse than anything else in TFA is insulting my intelligence, especially when it comes to career advancement. That's why I left a job I'd been at for quite a long time. The company suddenly decided to gamble that I didn't know the difference between inflation and core inflation.