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Comment by gopalv | Hacker News Reader

The best teams I've worked in has had A-players, B-players and C-players.

Some of the C-players were wild kids with potential, who needed mentoring.

Some of the B-players were people who were not motivated at all - some because they wanted money and the company didn't pay, some because they had been promoted upto their level of competence.

The best bit the A-players did more than anything else was to make the B-players competent & motivate them. They added in their abilities and sure, wasted a lot of time sitting in other people's desks. But the team of five or so around an A-player grew and prospered to become incredibly effective.

That was an awakening. That was when I stopped overworking myself to write tons of code and try to follow into the foot-steps of those A-players who became "force multipliers" in any team.

Knowing the people I admired, I feel like it will take another decade, at least.

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I'm pretty sure that the whole notion of A-players, B-players etc is just an easy way for people in dysfunctional teams to put the blame on those idiots they have to work with.

Some people work great as a team; some don't. There's no magic formula that will predict that. Classifying people as A-, B-players etc assumes there is some well-ordered relation describing the productivity of employees; but such a thing does not exist.

There are people with good leadership skills, people who are great when guided, people who prefer working on their own. Some know every tiny technical detail of the platform they work with, some have a talent for hacks that work great in practice. If you try measuring all these people on an arbitrary one-dimensional scale, and pick only the A-players, you'll more likely then not end up with another dysfunctional team (but someone will then just measure along a different axis and declare that the team failed because of all those B-players)

I agree with most of your post, and the 'force-multiplier' aspect is important, however

The definition of A/B/C players is mostly subjective and dependent on the company as well.

An excellent Java developer can suck at a Python house and vice-versa (probably will suck less, but still).

But, the main definition of "A-Players" seems to be people that will overwork themselves for the company

And for these I say: yes, I'm not an A-Player, sorry...

> An excellent Java developer can suck at a Python house and vice-versa (probably will suck less, but still).

I've yet to meet an excellent developer who was only excellent in his language of choice. In my experience at least, almost all of the talents that make an A player an A transcend whatever language they're using and has far more to do with their ability to reason and hold an entire system in their head.

Then why do nearly all of the "A-player" organizations still require X years of language/framework-specific experience in their job postings?

>But, the main definition of "A-Players" seems to be people that will overwork themselves for the company

It's really not even anything that consistent.

The definition of "A Players" is "whoever management is currently in love with."

Putting in long hours, doing incredibly vital work, but the brass doesn't get that funny feeling in their pants when they think about you? Then you're a B player at best and management has an infinite list of reasons why it's your fault that's the case.

It's utterly narcissistic ego-driven garbage.

There's a special kind of a-player who doesn't (or even can't) code, though understands the work of others. For example, Jobs early in his career and later on as well certainly seemed to fill your definition of an A-player force multiplier, with one exception: he did not code personally at all, according to Woz.

It is very interesting that he still fit the rest of your description, as far as I understand.

I wonder what he did at Atari if he didn't code? He wasn't a force multiplier there, he actually ended up on a shift by himself because everyone hated working with him.

I always assumed that he could code at a very basic level, perhaps I was wrong.

Wire wrapping? In any case it probably isn't important what he did, and it is even possible that he was bad at it and should have been fired, and all of that having no bearing on his future success. Successful people don't excel at everything they do.

What is nice about these hiring/firing posts is the perspective on how various companies sort out what works with employees. What isn't so great are the piles of insecure comments these posts bring. It's good to keep in perspective that lack of success in one place doesn't imply permanent lack of future success elsewhere.

He probably should have been fired due to his abrasive attitude, but he allegedly did good work, and so they created a night shift just for him.

I wasn't implying that success at one job has anything to do with success at another, I was just curious what one would do at Atari that isn't coding, yet is so appreciated that the company would go to great lengths to keep from firing him.

Sorry. I wrote that quickly on my phone. Only the suggestion about wire wrapping was a direct response to your question.

But now that I read more about it I'm less certain. The guy who hired him doesn't really go in to detail about what was great about him. He says things like "He was very often the smartest guy in the room, and he would let people know that" and the article says Bushnell has the attitude that "there is something to be learned from a guy who was creative and unconventional. Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today."

That makes it look like Bushnell was easily able to look past any difficulty in dealing with Jobs, even if he had to separate Jobs from his coworkers.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mike-cassidy/ci_22890892/cassidy-...

My larger point was aimed at the attitude in a lot of comments on any posts related to job skills, hiring, or firing, where any notion that some people find more success in some jobs than others, or with some skill set or other, is met with angry responses that seem to have the logical conclusion that people should be given a job based on a lottery or a desire to work with the company regardless of the benefit to the company, that a policy that one company tries or makes work is evil because it would cause problems if every company adopted the exact same policy, and finally that any mark of failure is irrecoverable and taints one forever.

While I was looking for some evidence of a young Steve Jobs being "the smartest guy in the room", I came across an early interview where Jobs says that one of the greatest strengths of Silicon Valley is that companies see failure as a value and mark of experience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvvM0TZ4Lg#t=19

Oh, a friend of mine is just like that. He is very smart, but very rarely codes (he likes to let his friends do the coding for him :-)). And by the way, he is of Syrian descent as well!

I think he just made his first couple of millions working for the Samwer brothers.

To quote a subheading from the original HBR article:

  > Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

At no point does the article argue that job performance can be measured abstractly, without taking the context of the work into consideration.

Using your example, those you're labeling as "B Players" would be "A Players" within the context of their current team.

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