There are no B players | Hacker News Reader

There are no B players

danieltenner.com

211 pointsswombat95 comments

I like the einstein quote about a fish judged by its ability to clime a tree. This happens a lot, though the mismatch can be much more subtle than that.

Almost every "senior" technical job I've seen in the last 10 years ("senior" really just means 5-7 years of experience, if that) contains verbiage about autonomy - choosing technologies, establishing best practices, setting architectural direction. HR speak for "let this developer decide how to do the job." I've also noticed, though, that as a developer, you often really have to fight to get this kind of autonomy, even if it was right there in the very formal job description everyone signed when you were hired.

This is because every project is different and has a history. The CIO went to a conference and made a huge investment in a product that needs to succeed to justify the expense. The director of technology is all about "agile", which means setting strict deadlines and asking people if they've met them in daily standup meetings. A chief architect who contributed many hours to an open source project, reassuring the director of technology that it will payoff tenfold once other people start using it, now believes that this should be the toolbox for your project.

While I'm sure you can read some cynicism in what I've just written, sometimes these are excellent choices - for the person who made them! Here's my analogy.

Someone studied tennis players, and concluded, based on John McEnroe's success, that tennis players should play left handed, slice the backhand, and get to the net as quickly as possible, avoiding rallies of more than 5 strokes.

So they hire Bjorn Borg, who appears to be a good tennis player. They hand him his racket, and tell him that at his next French Open (played on slow clay instead of fast grass), he will serve and volley and play left handed. Borg will no longer appear to be a tennis genius, but he's such a good athlete that he could probably win reasonably challenging local leagues this way. You know, a B player.

There is a limit to autonomy.

I mean, if you have a project that is big enough that 10 people are working on it, you have to have consensus about version control, build systems, what version of what languages and libraries you have running in so forth. If you don't, life is going to be hell for the ops people. If the organization can't enforce these kind of standards, it is a failing organization.

If some place has 150k lines of Cold Fusion and Microsoft SQL stored procedures and you are hired to maintain that system, you are going to have to deal with that environment, and you can either do what you can with that environment or go someplace else if you don't want to deal with it.

There are many dimensions to performance and one of it is that some people are good starters and other people are good finishers. The starters do the 20% of the work that gets you (seemingly) 80% of the way there, but the finishers have the determination, energy, pride and broad-spectrum knowledge and experience to do the 80% of the work that gets you (seemingly) 20% of the way there.

Superficially the starter seems to be 25x more productive than the finisher, but without the finisher, the starter might not deliver any business value at all.

The huge variation in the numbers, plus all of the emotional and political factors involved make a correct accounting of the situation almost impossible. Depending on how it plays out, the starter could be seen as a C player and the finisher an A player (the product wouldn't have shipped without the finisher or it could be around (people forget that the finisher actually shipped the product, all they remember was that he was always complaining about the build system)

> Superficially the starter seems to be 25x more productive than the finisher, but without the finisher, the starter might not deliver any business value at all.

I wrote a post about exactly that:

http://jacquesmattheij.com/A+tale+of+two+programmers

Finishers are actually quite rare and worth their weight in gold. And starters need finishers just as much as finishers need starters, but I've seen tons of people that are good at starting stuff and only very few that are good at finishing. It takes real perseverance and dedication to see a project through to its conclusion.

I like the einstein quote about a fish judged by its ability to clime a tree.

In another front-page story, a woman has been found to lack a cerebellum. She was said to have motor and speech deficiency. Or you can say she's been a genius, compensating with her fine cortex the handicap.

This is because every project is different and has a history.

Different? That's identical to one I happen to know :-)

> They hand him his racket, and tell him that at his next French Open (played on slow clay instead of fast grass), he will serve and volley and play left handed.

This is essentially what happened with Rafael Nadal, who's uncle/coach made him play left-handed despite being naturally right-handed. He's won the French Open 9 of the 10 times he's played it.

That's where I disagree with the "No B Players" argument. I agree that people need to be put in situations where they can succeed. But there are certain people for which that set of situations where then can excel is significantly larger than normal. And there's a lot of people who are only able to be successful in a very narrow set of circumstances. As a business, it's very rare that you can design a role around a candidate. But you can choose to hire the most adaptable employees you can find. Those are the A players.

And, for me, those A players share one simple trait...the love to learn and pursue it outside of work. Whether it's an engineer experimenting with new technologies in side projects or someone learning a new language/skill outside of work, that need to continually grow as a person leads to employees who can almost always fit themselves into whatever role comes along. Those are the A players that I look for when hiring employees and when interviewing with a potential employer and that's the type of employee I try to be.

I think you've just agreed with the OP's premise. Your criteria for A-player is that they be adaptable. You hire people who are adaptable and you're happy with those people because they meet your criteria.

But other employers have different criteria. Some value productivity over adaptability: they like people who can product vast amounts of value in a specific set of circumstances, and they're happy to ensure those circumstances are met. The classic example of this is the "no social skills" code geek who can churn out vast amounts of production code but is totally unable to handle a meeting with a customer to agree requirements.

I agree with your sentiment about loving work. That point of Flow where work and play meet is where people get to shine and be great. But it's a different place for everyone, and some are not that adaptable.

My understanding is that Nadal didn't really switch to being left handed. When he was a child (was it age 8?), he had two handed strokes off both sides, which is common for kids. Young tennis players often drop the non-dominant hand on the forehand when they get stronger. His uncle, noticing that he was as strong off the left as the right, encouraged him to play as a lefty. He perfected this over countless hours for the next 11 years, winning the french open at age 19. This is vastly different from taking a seasoned pro and suddenly telling him to play with complete different tactics with his non-dominant hand! In fact, if Nadal were required to play with Federer's strokes tomorrow (ie., use his right hand, and hit a one handed backhand), my guess is that he'd get bageled in his next pro match, and I doubt he'd ever be in the top 100 again (that's an extremely conservative estimate, there's a good chance he'd permanently collapse in the rankings).

That said, I do think that Nadal is an excellent example of how to be adaptable. Take a look some time at how he approached hard courts after his initial success on clay. Rather than staying way back, he moved much closer in on the court, taking the ball on the rise, and taking his opponent's time away. It was a big adjustment for the former clay court specialist, but it worked, and it's why Nadal is now one of the few players with a career slam, and titles on every surface.

So yes, you need to adapt, but (and I know I'm stretching a sports analogy a big far here) it demonstrates how the truly top players go about change. They do adapt, but they're highly strategic about it, they leverage existing strengths, and they don't do it on a whim (and they especially don't do it on someone else's whim).

I actually think that technical leaders are also very organizationally savvy people. They adapt and learn new things, but they don't get jerked around from task to task - and they'll say no and fight strategically about it if need be. They understand how to align their projects with their strengths, and what they want to learn next. This way, they don't waste time or mental energy, and they play from a position of strength.

Thanks for that, it is a good read. My first manager at Sun used to say "there are no bad employees, just bad fits." and over the years I've seen the wisdom of that. I have been guilty of labeling someone as being a 'B' player only to see that person excel in a different environment later. The risk for younger engineers and people who don't know this is to make bad decisions about joining or hiring or leaving a situation. As a manager I've used it sometimes as a rationalization, knowing that by letting someone go they were going to have an opportunity to find a better match for their personality, but it doesn't "good" knowing you're giving someone that opportunity. It feels like you failed them.

When I interview folks I try to get a sense of what makes them excited to get up in the morning. Do they like solitude? (not good in a open plan office) Do they like to try lots of things in rapid succession? Are they people that like to bend existing things to their will or people who want to create something beautiful from whole cloth? If you can figure out the thing that energizes them and provide it, you will get great results from them.

What should one do if they feel like they are in a B position? How does one know if it is the environment that needs to change, or something one needs to learn and grow about oneself?

From my experience, it's almost always both. There are things about the environment and work nature that are not conducive to the said person - thereby not allowing said person to function optimally.

Most times there are some things under the individual's control. Examples: Being more explicit with the manager about the kind of work that one would like to do, coming in an hour earlier (and leaving an hour earlier) to get some solitude in the mornings in an open floor plan, blocking calendars to disallow meetings at one's most productive time, etc..

But having said that, most relationships quickly become toxic when too many things start to fail. One is never sure if it is just oneself or the environment, if a certain action is just the boss having a bad day or part of a larger corporate thought process. At this stage, one is left with no choice to leave.

The best advice I can give is to take an extended vacation (10+ days) at such a point. Clarity often strikes when the immediacy of the problems are no longer at hand.

I don't think there is one answer to that question. Over the years I've suggested people follow their passions because my observation was that people working on something they were passionate about, were good at it. While I stand by that advice, I've also observed times where people were passionately working at something, poorly. Which is to say they had the energy but not the mental discipline associated with growth in skill and expertise.

As the author explained in his post, being a B player can have roots deep inside your head, in Daniel's case, "It turns out that I don’t operate at my full potential when I believe someone else will find and fix my mistakes. I play better without a safety net. I also have a burning need to work on stuff that I feel I own completely."

I'm not sure how to trigger self reflection in others, I grew up doing it and thought it was something everyone did until I met lots and lots of people who never asked themselves "Why did I respond that way?" or "Where did that come from?".

In Daniel's quote, and in my own makeup, ownership is a big deal. Even something as simple as loading the dishwasher is demotivating to me if my wife insists I load it "like she would." So for me if I'm not doing well I ask "Am I not taking ownership here of this outcome?" And if the answer is yes I need to figure out if its because I've tried and been rebuffed (suggests changing jobs) or I've not really tried (suggests changing my own behavior). I recognize though that what works for me is probably useless for others.

This is called "metacognition" in educator circles, and it can make a big difference in how people react to different situations. The skill to evaluate and monitor your own thinking is something that many people never learn. See e.g. http://www.etc.edu.cn/eet/Articles/metacognition/start.htm

Funny. I was writing something along the same lines but Daniel does a much better job of wording it. The essence is spot on, it's the organization that makes people excel or fail.

Dysfunctional organizations happen much more frequently than dysfunctional people do.

Once upon a time I was a 'B' player too (after starting out as an 'A' one I quickly got demotivated to the point where I didn't want to go to work at all, this was at a big bank). I'm happy they didn't take Daniel out back and shot him.

A good company will mentor and will teach as well as empower, maximizing the contribution its employees make by rewarding their input and by respecting them as human beings first and employees second. That's a very hard trick but the most successful companies know how to do this well.

And it's that part - the corporate culture - that is the hardest to shape and nurture. Lose it and you've lost your momentum, if not your future.

I think this is the point that's really missing; that it isn't just the person and the environment need to match, as though the environment is some immutable thing. As a manager, you have to notice when your "A" players are falling and change things if necessary. You can change the environment to make more "A" players out of your team. Though, sadly, more often management winds up making "B" players out of "A" players. Or making ex-employees out of them.

By the way, there is a counter-argument. The true "A" players are go-getters who bring about organizational change, who seek out challenges in an unchallenging environment, etc. The "B" players aren't demotivated by bad management, a hostile environment, lack of freedom or respect - they're people who are just naturally unmotivated, lazy, etc.

I hate that argument, of course. It suggests motivation and productivity is just some innate, immutable trait. And ultimately, it exists to excuse managerial failings.

> The "B" players aren't demotivated by bad management, a hostile environment, lack of freedom or respect - they're people who are just naturally unmotivated, lazy, etc.

I strongly disagree with that. In the wrong environment I could definitely be a 'B' player, in the right environment I'm unstoppable.

> “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Albert Einstein

I'm pretty sure Einstein never said this.

It's important to correct these misattributions, because they spread quite virulently and paint a saccharine picture of Einstein. He was a great scientist, let's understand him from his real work instead of from made-up poster quotes.

Here's the top Google result for this quote, which quite extensively examines it and concludes there is no connection to Einstein: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/

P.S. There's an easy heuristic to apply to Einstein quotes with a life lesson in them: he didn't say it. You'll be correct 95% of the time.

Thanks for the update... added it to the article. :-)

That's very kind of you. I enjoyed reading your article.

Reminds me of Bob Sutton, a Stanford prof and author who writes[1]:

"This tendency to look for individual goats – and heroes – isn’t just a problem that permeates the world of sports. It is reflected in many misguided ideologies and management practices, which focus excessive energy on hiring stars and weeding-out mediocre and poor performers, and insufficient energy on building a great system that enables most competent people to succeed.

I agree – and can show you evidence – that there are huge differences in individual skill and ability in every occupation. BUT we’ve also got a lot of evidence that ordinary people can perform at top levels in a well-designed system, and even a superstar is doomed to fail in a bad system."

Sutton, you know, researches these kinds of things rather than holding a blind belief that once you hire A players, your job is done.

1 - http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/08/crappy_people...

Very good piece. It really puts all the responsibility on the employer as it should be. See, if you do your job of getting people good for your environment, it doesn't matter whether their output is 1 or 100--the cost of integrating them is proportionate. For example if u have an intern with output 1 who fits your environment and the cost is .1 and another whose output is .25 and the cost is 5, ie to train them, you have a problem. It doesn't matter the output. It matters how frictionlessly they can join your company and not cause problems. And that is all up to u to forecast. I contract out all of the world all the time to developers of varying skill levels, motivation levels and personalities. It's up to me to match the right task to the right developer. And I don't need everyone to have 100 productivity or even have many available work hours.

The most important bit for me is not to treat people as 'disposables'. The ease with which people get hired and fired really does not sit well with me. Employers are way too quick to hire people rather than to do a serious vetting up front. Spending real time on a hire is definitely worth it and once you've narrowed it down to a shortlist it's perfectly ok to spend half a day or more with a prospective hire in order to make sure they are who you need and that the fit is right, that you're not hiring a fish for a tree climbing job.

But once you've pulled the trigger on that the responsibilities run both ways. Employers are quick to expect loyalty but are loathe to display loyalty in return. This can be vastly improved upon.

The best way to judge the health of a company is a single number: employee turnover as a fraction of the total company size.

A good academic article on the topic is "Set Up to Fail: How Bosses Create Their Own Poor Performers" by Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux. http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=4...

Abstract: This paper explores how managers behave differently towards perceived higher and lower performers - and how a manager's expectations of subordinate performance tend to get acted out by the subordinates. It focuses particularly on the way boss behavior towards "lower performers", while intended to increase performance, often ends up discouraging and alienating these subordinates. The boss and perceived lower performer become entrapped in a vicious circle which is costly for the bosses, the subordinates, team and the wider organization. The paper considers how to recognize such a dynamic and how to break out of the vicious circle.

"If you're going to be hung as a horse thief, you might as well take a nice ride."

I really like the post but I don't agree with the conclusion.

> don’t make the mistake to think that those who don’t fit your specific environment are unworthy human beings

> don’t let yourself fall into the trap of thinking you’re better than them

I think from a personal and societal perspective, both of these statements are great. But in business, who cares? People found ambitious startups because they think they are better than the companies/people that reside in that space. Founding a company is inherently an arrogant exercise, the opposite of a humble one. Business loves arrogance and confidence because business is hard. If you spend all your time philosophizing about the humanity of it all, some other competitor who doesn't care is just going to beat you [unless it is a competitive advantage].

So basically, if you are firing somebody, it really doesn't matter whether you are firing them because you think they are a B/C player or because you think they are a great person but they aren't a fit. You are firing them. From a humanity perspective it would be great if you spent a bunch of time helping them find a new job and gave them a great severance package, but as nice as that feels there is no guarantee this is good for your business at all.

This is a terrible attitude. In the grand scheme of things making things better for those around you should be the goal of any enterprise, business or otherwise. Lose this and you end up with modern corporations staffed with psychopaths and there is plenty of evidence that this is the case.

I know a guy who operates like that. He's in fact quite successful, has exited a company at $25M+, is extremely abrasive to work with and thinks he's the smartest guy on the planet and treats most people around him like shit. If anybody has a god complex it's him.

If he'd been a little bit less arrogant, a little bit less abrasive and a bit more aware of how many people it took to get there then he would have exited at a far higher valuation and would not quite possibly still lose it all due to messing up during the lock-up period.

Why you fire people is extremely important because every time you fire someone you should be telling yourself: I most likely made a mistake at some point in the past, otherwise this firing would not have happened, how can I avoid this.

That way the company culture will improve rather than that you're setting yourself up for a repetition of moves.

I think you can found a company humbly. If you're trying to enter an already-crowded space, sure, you have to believe that you're better than the competition. But if you're the first to enter a space, it pays to be humble, because you don't even know what people want yet.

Lack of humility is what keeps businesses on paths that don't attract users, or even actively repel users. You have to be able to dump your hypotheses once they've been shown to be incorrect.

This aligns with Malcolm Gladwell's article "The Talent Myth" http://gladwell.com/the-talent-myth/ which focuses on how Enron self destructed even though it was filled with "A players". Gladwell asserts that anyone can be highly productive in the right environment with appropriate supporting organization and process.

I'm pretty sure lack of talent was the last thing that brought down Enron.

more like lack of ethics

Which leads to the point that talent does not guarantee success. I don't think talent is even the primary factor, though the article seems to go one step further and claim that all people are equally talented.

There is a super good movie about Enron named 'The smartest guys in the room', highly recommended.

Being an A or B player isn't something that happens at birth. Your performance at work depends on a lot of factors.

But there are B players out there, and A players are doing better work than them. This is irrefutable if you've ever worked on a team of significant size. It's not supposed to be some personality-damning attribute that implies a B player is forever doomed, or always brings less utility to the table than an A player. It is specific to their current role, work, etc.

I agree.

I would say we all can be A or B players depending on a huge mixture of psychological factors including what people think of us, what we think of ourselves, what we think of the job we do ... and countless more.

If someone's company is full of 'B players' in reality they're saying their company is full of under motivated people. Why they are under motivated is a different matter and can be a complex affair usually combining internal and external factors.

"But there are B players out there, and A players are doing better work than them."

Yes, but it turns out the correct question is why, not who.

When you ask why, you find out how to make everyone succeed. When you ask who, you get a slew of negative cultural consequences.

No. There is no correct question. There are a ton of factors involved in an individual's performance, some of which are personal, some are organizational, some are circumstantial.

Don't oversimplify it. Asking why does not allow you to find out how to make everyone succeed. It might help. It might not. But in general, I don't put much stock in notions of everybody succeeding. That's rhetoric, not real world.

It is true that not everybody can be brought to succeed in every environment, but I think that's exactly what the article tries to convey. That if you feel that you are surrounded by 'B' players that the problem does not lie with the players but with the way the game is played.

And that is fixable. Adapting the game to the players will go a very long way to making 'B' players perform better, in some cases by relocating them to different roles or maybe sending them out to training.

Trying to ram square pegs through round holes will not work, that's the way to create 'B' players. And a very large amount of this is the result of poor hiring practices, hiring people that do not fit their roles or the corporate culture or the level of management they need (vs the degree of independence they crave).

Fitting the company to the people isn't always possible, we usually don't run armies where piles of conscripts ('soldiers') are being run through the mill to see who can be promoted to a role of more responsibility.

So oversimplifying it definitely is not the road, but simply saying person 'x' is a 'B' player and is beyond help is probably not the truth either.

In 99% of cases, the problem is not with the people within a company, but with the motivational, management, and work systems which surround them. That is the point.

It is important to realize subtleties in how people operate, but it's more important to realize that most problems are attributable to the system and not the individuals.

Critically important, in fact. That's why it's the right way to look at the problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

You are right that it doesn't guarantee it, but it does allow it. Do you see the distinction?

You could have caught yourself when you said there is no correct question. Given enough questions, some are correct. And if why isn't one of the first questions to ask about anything, if not the most important one, what would you say are some useful questions to ask?

Also, you not putting much stock in notions of everybody succeeding is a statement about you, not about everybody. You don't have to want everybody to succeed obviously, but I can't imagine you not wanting anyone to succeed either. Perhaps you are ok with only some people succeeding. Like close family and friends, for example. It doesn't have to be everyone.

He claims no one is bad and some just don't fit and will thrive elsewhere, but this is nonsense to anyone with big corporation experience. I've met many people who never did any work, only jumped to the next easiest excuse for why they turned nothing in, and just got their pay check because it was too much of a pain to fire them.

In my personal experience, large corporations are particularly demotivating to almost everyone, so it's not a surprise that there are a lot of so-called B, C, or even D players there.

I've met some like that in certain environments, but I wonder if it isn't a part of an unholy match between their priorities and the employer priorities.

That is, a place I saw this commonly was a government defense contractor. One of the guys there joined because he figured, eh, government, job security. Huge projects, very little accountability. The whole system is set up for failure; the profitable projects are still failures, and any project that overdelivers cost the company money, because that benefit is legally prevented from being used in their favor when bidding on future contracts.

It's in the company's interest to keep a stable of employees who produce at a -predictable- pace, who are complacent and don't excel (so raises can be predictable and there won't be employee initiated turnover). And that was what this person was looking for.

What happens if this person suddenly has to start being competitive? What happens if people start relying on him for more? I don't know. You don't know. These people themselves probably don't know. I can't use those examples to disqualify the OP, even though I too am very familiar with them.

Exactly. I had a co-worker once, who was a JavaScript programmer — with zero knowledge of JavaScript. Could not tell function call from variable definition, and wasn't willing to learn, because why do that.

The scary part: he worked there for 2-3 years. Doing absolutely nothing. Like that dude from Dilbert, only in real life.

I learned an excellent lesson in management from this, got in serious shit for trying to get a guy like that fired.

Give them glowing reviews and a transfer somewhere else, in the same way that a null can be cast to any class, someone who can do nothing can work in any field.

The second line is the quote of the day for me :)

The way I see the metaphor used, A players are 10x as productive as B players.

The group you describe seem to be actively trying to get nothing done, which would put them in an different category (C players? F(ailure) players? I(ncompetent) players?).

Profiteers. The other day someone asked about finding a job just like that.

Sounds like they thrived there to me. Maybe it was a good fit for them after all.

I think big corporates are a perfect example. Have you ever poured your heart and soul into a project only to have it canned for political reasons? Ever worked in a job that could be automated or done by half as many people but doing so would reduce a managers/directors/departments power? Ever wanted to switch to working on important projects where you can make a difference only to have your manager refuse your transfer because it would make his/her job harder?

This sort of stuff is common in big corporates and a natural response is to do the bare minimum.

Nice article, enjoyed that.

We humans seem to have an intrinsically elitist point of view which leads to the idea that people are intrinsically better or worse. Hence class/caste systems institutional racism etc... oh and A/B players ;-)

However there is a plenty of evidence to the contrary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/09/18/161159263/teacher...

Basically if you read between the lines of OP's story, he was a B player, but then the fear of no safety net made him an A player.

Anyone touring the halls of Google, HP, Microsoft, or Intel, knows for a fact that large, years-old organizations gather lots of dead weight. That is just the nature of human organizations.

The alternative is either start-ups where the fear of death is ever present. Or companies like Facebook (where allegedly you get fired in 12 months if you don't deliver tangible value).

There are many people that deliver A level work without the fear of death. But you can't assume you can fill your large organization with such people. They are rare. Its hard enough to fill a small start up with such people, but at least that is in the realm of possibility.

Google is never going to find 5000 self-motivated stars. Just look at how far behind AWS Google Cloud is. Google is the nice, comfortable work environment we all want to be in. Amazon is the scary environment with the sword of damocles over our shoulder at all times.

I would put it differently. I agree with the author's point that people are not A or B players -- but you can meaningfully rate them so in particular roles. The author is an A player in the right role. I don't think this should be news; you can see it in coaching of sports teams. Success often comes from matching people to the right role.

The whole "A's hire A's" thing is a bit trite, but it's probably true that if you are not a good fit to your current role, it's even less likely that you will be able to determine whether someone else is a good fit. (There are exceptions. There are non-technical people who are good at hiring technical people. They're just rare.)

As far as organizations gathering dead weight -- while mis-hires are propbably a big cause, people aren't immutably A, B, or C players. Life happens, priorities change, people sometimes shift roles over time as well.

I agree with everything you say.

BTW, A's hire A's is bullshit. A's hire B's all the time. Hiring is a specific skillset, and A managers suck at being A recruiters.

Its not "As hire As". It's "Bs hire Cs, so As must be careful to not hire Bs" Anyway it's a trite face not supported by research.

Did you just call Amazon a startup on the brink of extinction? Amazon is a giant old company like Google

Sorry. I was not clear. Amazon is a more brutal environment, and not as cozy, for engineers. Or so I hear. I don't have first hand experience, but I hear that they ride you pretty hard there.

... or alternately: everyone becomes a "B player" when they don't really care.

As the post correctly states, people are not cogs. We are sentient beings with complex, conceptual motivational structures. Companies with a sense of mission and purpose can get A work out of most of their people, but if the mission and purpose isn't real -- if it's a put-on or if it fades or gets distorted with time -- then the effect fades as well. You can't really fake it, at least not for very long.

This article reminded me of perhaps the most striking science fiction short story ever written: In Case Of Fire by Randall Garrett. It's a story I try to keep in mind every time I have to shuffle tasks, or when I review my interview notes.

Looks like it's available online too: http://gutenberg.readingroo.ms/2/4/5/2/24521/24521-h/24521-h...

Great read

It is true that environment (and other non-intrinsic factors) have a huge effect on how much value a person adds to a company (or community, or friendship). I've definitely experienced this variance personally.

That said, if I had my perfect environment, and you had your perfect environment...we would not be equally good at doing particular tasks. For some values of me and you, the difference in effectiveness would be tremendous. We can argue all day if that is due to nature or nurture - but the end result is that some people are just better at doing particular tasks than most other people, by a very wide margin.

Also, some people are more consistent in their value add in spite of particular forms of external variance. For a concrete example, there are some people who will very productively stay with a company as it grows from 20 to 2000 people while others will prefer to hop around to stay in smaller companies.

Like most advice, it's not literal.

Only hire A players! Fire the B players!

The subtext that you seem to be overlooking here is that you shouldn't settle for 'good enough' and instead, raise your hiring standards.

>There are no B players, only people whose potential is not being brought to life, fish which are made to climb trees and then told they suck.

As uncouth as it may be, there are plenty of people who just simply aren't good enough to do a particular job. I'm sure you've worked with more than one engineer who, despite any help provided, was just not cut out to be a good programmer.

Your overall message will help someone to be a better person. I don't necessarily believe it will make them a better employer.

> As uncouth as it may be, there are plenty of people who just simply aren't good enough to do a particular job.

Sure. In reality I think both are true, and this makes the problem of building a great company even more challenging.

No organization can make someone who isn't good at something be good at it, but a dysfunctional organization can turn a genius into a B or C player. So as the builder of an organization, you are powerless to improve your people but very capable of demotivating and destroying them.

Tough breaks.

That's not quite right. You can certainly inspire folks to do their best. Different from 'improving' them I suppose; but with the same result?

No, it's harder than that.

If you don't inspire people, you get B (or worse) work out of everyone. Being inspiring is the only way to get A work out of anyone, ever. Nobody works at their full potential for a "bullshit job."

You can't actually hire 'B' players, you can however hire fish and then tell them go climb trees.

Employers definitely can improve, I've seen it in person. I've also seen the opposite, companies that started out ok and ended up being a total disaster due to the relationship with their employees.

The critical point is when you go beyond about 20 employees. If you can make that transition culture in-tact and respect maintained then you'll do great. But if you don't you'll never reach 50 employees and your turnover will at some point balance your ability to hire.

There are a whole lot of letters after B. The article seems to be trying to fight the claim that non-top-performers are broken and damaging, "hopeless B players to be culled". You can't do much for people who just can't do their jobs.

I read the book Topgrading a few years back, defined A-player relative to the position: "An ‘A’ player as defined by Topgraders is one who qualifies among the top 10% of talent for the compensation available for a position (any position)."

I think this concept has been understood for many years in industry. However, In startup land, its been ego-cized a bit through logic like "people are the most important assets of startups, therefor there are good people and bad people, only hire the good people". But this logic alone is open for misinterpretation because whether talking about "A-player" or "10xer", good is much for a function of ability of an organization to empower a person in a position.

On the other hand, there is a reality that certain individuals will be an "A-player" more consistently in more positions than other individuals.. so I believe there is some value to understanding how an individual's general behaviors would, or would not, make them an A-player in specific positions. At the same time, its likely very difficult to deduce this kind of statement meaningfully unless the same person has worked with someone in multiple positions.

Good points. In the 3rd edition of Topgrading I offer definitions of A, B, C across many competencies, but early in the book I say that the simplest way to think of A, B, C Players is high performer, adequate, low performer. I've asked 6,500 executives (in Topgrading Interviews) to characterize the teams they inherited and ended up with and they easily relate to high perfumer, adequate, low performer ... and the long explanation of "top 10%% can be avoided. These 3 categories work for executives or part time stockers. That said, over time companies get better and better "calibrated" and the requirements become stiffer; therefore, in 2014 clients think back to their designations 3 years ago and now put a higher percentage in the lower categories ... because is does take time/experience to accurately rate someone. Hope this helps!

I don't get it. The author rails through the whole essay that there are no A players and B players, but the conclusion concedes that some people are stronger and smarter, and some people are going to fit into your company better, which from the perspective of the employer, is fully equivalent to the A/B thing. The only difference is in what you think they might accomplish elsewhere, and vague notions of their value as a human being.

More interesting is the point that a given person may thrive in one environment and falter in another. This is totally true, and very important to keep in mind when evaluating what to do with people who are faltering, but it's not a dichotomy between that and the "fully general robust innate talent" theory. Both are true. Some people are simply stronger and smarter, but on top of that, environment plays a large role. Act accordingly.

I'll be a contrarian and say that there ARE B players out there and C players and so on. That part is true.

The part about a great organization or team has a structure that fosters excellence is true.

Where this falls down for me is that there IS a synergy between the two where you get the right process with the right team and magic can happen that wouldn't so much come from a bunch of average to terrible people.

For example, look at the New York Yankees vs the Oakland A's. Every so often Billy Beane is able to get a team together that makes an amazing run, but at some point a team with great process and top tier talent wins if only for the fact that they are more skilled AND they have the right organization as a team that allows them to excel.

When you have BOTH great players and a great organization/process, then you reach the top levels.

He's just misinterpreting the quote, and then setting up a strawman to make an slightly related point.

"A" players make an outsized impact on a rapidly growing organization. Successful startups aren't like other activities - it's built into the model that the early team has to be truly, deeply, amazing. If you don't think that "A" players exists in startup land, you're just not paying attention. Just like there are "B" players who join a startup and then just coast along and don't make a giant impact.

I've never heard Jobs (or anyone else for that matter), claim that all people could be permanently categorized as "A", "B", or "C" players.

You want to be Apple? eject the "B" players.

I have only recently found a position where I feel I might be a A minus fit. Being a B player sucks - especially if like most other b players you are trying to hide it.

In fact I would say hiding B player dom is the thing most likely to prevent getting to A. The problem is very very few environments allow one to make as brave an announcement as OP and survive with salary intact.

I think probably the best means to build a team of A players is to allow people to admit they are B players.

Scientific method is a great example of this

The article poses a false equivalence.

First off, there are absolutely people with greater skills, many of them made at birth, though I'll get back to that. You cannot take a B (or a Z) and make them an A.

But you can make an A into a B (or Z). Give them poor nutrition, childhood diseases, knocks on the head, environmental toxins, poor education. Or a toxic workplace, bad task fit, or other workplace issues. You can really easily take someone with a ton of talent and squelch it.

That's the real lesson here.

Agreed

I come from a different generation where people aren't all assumed to be equally smart and equally talented. So I very much subscribe to the idea that some people are clearly smarter and more talented than others.

There are definitely A players who are demotivated and become B players. But the point of "Only hire A players! Fire B players!" is simply due to the fact that most startups can't afford to sit around and move demotivated employees around until they find a good fit. It's also the same reason why many startups don't train people for jobs and instead expect them to be already experienced. The number 1 currency for startups is time, and if they don't get traction quickly, the entire company will falter. Wasting time and money on an employee that isn't a good fit, regardless of how intrinsically talented they are doesn't make sense, because the entire survival of the company demands that everyone is performing at top levels for a relatively short period of time.

As the company grows and turns a profit, and if it can afford to invest in employees, it might make more sense to try to elevate the performance of their B players by moving them around, etc. But that requires a more mature company.

I first heard this mantra at Google, which was far from a startup even when I joined in 2006. It could easily afford to try and find the right fit for people. In fact it took the opposite approach: you were only allowed to move around and try a new job or position if you already were doing well in your existing position. Internal transfers were seen as a reward for good behaviour, or perhaps it was to avoid bad employees avoiding detection by constantly moving around between managers.

> But the point of "Only hire A players! Fire B players!" is simply due to the fact that most startups can't afford to sit around and move demotivated employees around until they find a good fit.

I think that is very much correct. However, a central point of Daniel's post, modified for this example, is that one startup's "A-player" is another startup's "B-player", and vice versa. Additionally, its kinda hard to figure out who is going to be an "A-player" for you in the hiring process.

> It's also the same reason why many startups don't train people for jobs and instead expect them to be already experienced.

I'd argue that many startups don't have a handle on what they actually need, and depending on how fluid their execution is at a given time such a handle may not be possible.

> one startup's "A-player" is another startup's "B-player", and vice versa.

Or even within the same company, just different roles.

"It's also the same reason why many startups don't train people for jobs and instead expect them to be already experienced."

Most A players don't have experience with your specific stack. The A players who do can contract for 3-4x what a startup can offer (and 1% equity offers won't change their mind). Which is why startups end up hiring mainly B players.

Nothing wrong with a solid B player btw.

Personally, I think we're all pretty much A players until we're demotivated. It's dangerous to spend too long demotivated though, lest you fall behind and stick with the rut.

There are plenty of B players, some of them lifers and some of them just there for a time due to other circumstances (young child, old parents, etc), but they(we) very much do exist.

Seriously, not everyone is a genius, and not everyone will work to stretch out what they can.

The vast majority of people are just middle of the road.

I don't really get the point of article... Find your own A player tailored to the environement you are building? How is this different than to hire A players?

Tiger Woods would be a b-player on the worst basketball team in the NBA. The question you need to ask is whether a person will be an A-player on your team.

So all you said was there are B players for specific companies, but they might be A players in a different one.

Fucking brilliant.

What a low level comment.

No, that's entirely not what he said. But if that's all that you got out of it then I guess that's better than nothing.

Correct, and courageous. A- and B-playership are mostly about context. People who are engaged and secure at work behave like A-players, trying to achieve more every day. People who are worried about political changes and protecting an income or status turn into B players.

"B players hire C players" isn't always true, and I use the name "insurance incompetent" for that (put someone awful on the team so no one half-good ever gets fired when you have to take a lump during layoff season). It's only one of many ways that people make suboptimal decisions out of insecurity.

A lot of terrible software is built when people with A-player talent turn into "B players" due to environmental insecurity.

Bravo, Daniel, my fellow humanist.

First world problem, this "too much meritocracy" thing.

It's a good thing. First world problems are good to have, discuss and overcome. "Third world problems" in the internetspeak are those for which the solution is known, but the general culture isn't ready for.

> "A few of us are lucky to be able to find or fashion an environment which enables us to give our best day after day after day."

That's not what A players are - at least in my book. An A player is productive and brilliant regardless the environment. A better environment allows them to be more productive, but they always stand out from the mass.

Maybe that means the A players I encountered were simply skillful enough to always pick the right environment - that's certainly possible. (If so, there's an obvious lesson in there)

But yes, there are B and C players. And they do drag down teams. If you have a good manager, they're able to coach the B players, and they'll shed the C players. If you have a bad manager, they try "A only", or they don't care.

"A only" doesn't work. There are not enough A players to make that possible. "Don't care" results in your typical dysfunctional corporate environment.

> An A player is productive and brilliant regardless the environment.

So, you're telling me that at least one person exists who can be productive in any environment? I don't believe that for a nanosecond.

I'm telling you that this person will be, on average, more productive than other people in any given environment.

If the system keeps the output net-negative, no, you can't change that. "A player" or not.

And of course, environment as related to the chosen profession. It's not like somebody who's good in one field is automatically good in another.

Not sure about the first part, but this part I like:

>But yes, there are B and C players. And they do drag down teams. If you have a good manager, they're able to coach the B players, and they'll shed the C players. If you have a bad manager, they try "A only", or they don't care.

>"A only" doesn't work. There are not enough A players to make that possible. "Don't care" results in your typical dysfunctional corporate environment.

The first part is based on personal experience. I've met a few people in my 25+ year career that do fit the "A" criteria. Very few.

They're exceedingly rare, but they exist. But you can't hire a whole team of them. What you can do is hire "B"s who aspire to be As. And if, as a manager, you're incredibly lucky, you'll see the occasional one reach that level. Consider yourself blessed if that happens.

Saying "there are no B or C players", however, is doing a disservice to your team - because it's your job as a leader to help people grow. And for that, you're better aware what level somebody performs at.

With this I completely agree. Professionalism is just that — being productive, doing your job and not behaving like a princess in the absence of ideal conditions and stuff.

In "right environment", given great code in a most beautiful and readable language, two hours a week with a coffee break in the middle — everyone can be a pro. Sadly, reality is not like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com