This reflects humans. If you need reliability for a clearly defined set of problems you don’t hire a superstar.
They will keep poking at the problem, drive it to directions you did not intend to and ultimately they will be worse at the task.
They will keep poking at the problem, drive it to directions you did not intend to and ultimately they will be worse at the task.
It's genius like that that sets human apart from machine!
Sometimes these dumb processes are there for a reason and you just have to follow them, no questions asked.
Example: military. They literally get rid of anyone who will question the processes. They might be right to question them, but it does not matter.
Define what they are performing at, and what you say becomes true, but then who is a high performer changes with every task.
For example, consider the police stations with maximum allowable IQs to be hired. The people in charge of the stations noticed that people with a high IQ were low performers, at that job. NASA meanwhile has no such cutoff.
Unless you're saying that there exists no conceivable context in which IQ would be a performance metric, in which case you would be wrong.
I wonder what goes wrong.
Now you're being asked to move buttons around a page and debating how rounded the corners should be and endlessly discussing about what kind of filters you should support and the app spends 3 seconds on startup loading 500mb of js libraries.
You can understand the mismatch - even though the latter of these two is how you make a product better! a company of 200 people making bold, sweeping changes results in a mess. a company of 200 people grinding away the finest of small changes results in a product
I've personally known a few PhDs that get them for the title, and they were lazy in the first place. There was this one guy I worked for who got a PhD in the easiest thing he could rationalize and targeted acquiring it from the lowest bar to entry. Only so he could say he had a PhD because, and this is what he told me: nobody will ask me what my PhD is in because they will assume it's related to my line of work (cyber security). I doubt most PhDs have this line of thinking, but there are a few outliers, clearly.
I don’t know, even with just an undergraduate degree I’m sure there are jobs that are spreadsheet manipulation. You could make the same case there?
What it comes down to is that there are different types of high performance. Some people are good at just executing tasks given by their manager. Some people are good at being generative, thinking across boundaries, acting autonomously, creating value without direction, etc. A term like "superstar" will get disproportionately applied to someone really good at the latter and rarely someone really good at the former, because the potential impact of the former is typically strictly capped, while the latter is uncapped.