7 ms·

If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. You can be the top 5% (I know

If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. You can be the top 5% (I know it's subjective and controversial yet I'm sure we all have a clue what that means) of developers and this will make it likely for you to be that "local maximum" as everyone will see you internally as a guru. But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. Get out of your comfort zone, and simply learn something new. Go wide, go deep or go both just realize that the moment you feel you are an expert on something it just means you are probably just ready to start learning it for real. tl;dr Knowing more than your peers doesn't make you an expert. You are at a local maximum and you need to look at the big picture to avoid being stuck there forever

kdamken 11y ago
This is very true and so important to your professional growth. There's a famous saying, "if you're the best one in the room, you're in the wrong room". At my last job I was the only developer at a small web agency, along with a designer and a project manager. Basically every problem and solution I had to figure out myself, and while I did that, due to time constraints I often had to go with just what worked, rather than figuring out the best of all possible options. At my current job, there are developers who know a lot more than me, and in the time I've spent working with them I've found I learn so much more so much more quickly than I did when I was working on my own.
- alsetmusic 11y ago
  I went from a job where I was the resident expert to one where everyone had unbelievable and baffling skills. I learned far more in the latter.
  - defen 11y ago
    > unbelievable and baffling skills Any examples you can share?
    - anpk 11y ago
      Maybe he's still in the baffled stage
allsystemsgo 11y ago
Agreed. It creeps up on you too. Always be looking for the next great learning opportunity.
- at-fates-hands 11y ago
  While I completely agree with this point - as a front-end developer its entirely maddening trying to keep pace and learn what the "next big thing" is going to be. For instance. . . . After leaving a very small local company I was working at, this is what I found after doing a few months of research and interviews: I had several interviews, every single one for a front-end role. They ran the gamut of JS frameworks. Do you know Backbone? AngularJS, Polymer, Typescript, ReactJS? A combination of some? or none at all? Not a single interviewer asked me about jQuery or my "vanilla" JS skills - NONE. Every company big and small was using some kind of framework, in some capacity - albeit in vastly different ways. The point here is there's no way for you to predict how your next great learning experience is actually going to help you down the road. Our landscape is changing virtually by the hour. I have now given up on trying to have a learning opportunity whereby I can add some really good skills to my resume not only for now - but for future opportunities. It's made me a bit jaded that our industry is so fragmented that even by learning a new library or framework, you effectively remove yourself from consideration from a host of companies because you didn't pick the "sexy" framework
  - stuxnet79 11y ago
    It's so easy to get pigeonholed. I am personally tired of the treadmill. Looking forward to transitioning into a leadership / project-manager role.
devonkim 11y ago
Can't upvote this enough. It is very important to recognize that "comfort zone" also means you must have room to fail, which is actually tough for companies to hire for because most companies are actually super risk averse when it comes to hiring. Why else would they want to hire people that know as much about their stack as a filter before asking questions about their potential? I went (foolishly, in hindsight) into areas on the thesis that a lot of organizations simply need some motivation from one or two highly capable people to raise the standards for everyone and that this form of leadership would be a good career path because people are oftentimes rewarded quite well for saving failing / ailing companies. Instead, I was beaten severely for trying to do create too much change for people that just wanted to a 9-to-5 job or (more importantly) given no projects with any risk or even much value even if it succeeded. I've come to realize that organizations without risk or without any sense of leaving their comfort zones are the same thing as people - these are beginner-expert organizations. These are companies who implement a working Hadoop cluster in production and give themselves a big pat on the back... in 2015. These are companies that implement some CMDB... in 2014. These are companies that are rolling out SOAP services seriously on a roadmap... for 2018. The aversion to risk leads inevitably to worse results than if you had accepted some failures, but this only makes sense anyway when your organization is capable of speed. And this becomes the ultimate chicken and the egg problem with large companies. My answer is that you must break your egg to create a new chicken - if you do not sacrifice something, you will lose everything for sure.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tunichtgut 11y ago
I dont know about that. Dont risk to much depending on your individual situation. Sometimes its better to be the king of the beggars, than to be the beggar of the kings. (improvement is always welcome, but be careful flipping corporations)
baldfat 11y ago
> If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. I liked Steven Covey's 7 Habits take on this much more "Sharpen the Saw." This approach and wording puts all the blame on those around you. That is very good to think your above those around you and that you are above average. A) Nothing wrong with average half the people are below average B) Rating someone top 5% is totally a perception unless your in something that can be measured easily (Think fast 100m Dash or the author's bowling) C) Having hired dozens of people for different jobs I can tell you that my top 5% at higher usually ended up being drama and the one person I just hired because I needed a body ASAP ended up being hands down my best employee. (Look at how Google has changed their hiring practices because hiring is close to impossible to get right, think NCAA Brackets) D) Self-deception - Everyone believes their kid is above average and self-delusion inflates our own self-assessment. Blaming those around you give you a great out of self-responsibility.
- dsp1234 11y ago
  A) Nothing wrong with average half the people are below average This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a system where we could rate developers. There are 4 'A' developers (92,95,97,91) and 2 'B' developers (83, 85). Only 1/3 of the developers are 'below average' as compared to below median, and flip those numbers around and 2/3 are below average. This is kind of important when evaluating the type of company culture that you're in. Is it a place where there are a lot of 'top 5%' developers, and a short tail of good, but not great developers. Or is it a place where there are just one or two developers that doing 'A' work, but a long tail of developers doing solid, but not great work. The 'average' could be misleading in these cases.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    Wow I have a Theology/Philosophy degree and I have seen what I can Theology/Philosophy gymnastics to make some wierd basic fact of life into a totally different thing. You might have missed your calling. Average = Average you have 100 developers 49 and below are bellow average :P
Delmania 11y ago
This is where I find myself, although my team is very small (2 people only). HN has gone a long way in eliminating my expert beginner syndrome. Looking at what people are doing, when all I'm doing is writing "textboxes over data", is both humbling and inspiring. I also find that sites like CodinGame, HackerRank, and Project Euler can also be helpful in combating that. Ultimately, I'm looking to make the leap into a more challenging job, but for now, these will have to do.
alexeiz 11y ago
> But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. What are those mythical companies? Really, I'd like to know. Name a few.
- hiddencost 11y ago
  RenTec and Jane Street come to mind.
  - AznHisoka 11y ago
    I've never even heard of those companies..
    - hiddencost 11y ago
      Jane Street makes up 2% of all equity trading in the US (by dollars), on a typical day. They're a 400 person quantitative trading company. RenTec is a hedge fund that has done something like 30% annual gains over like 30+ years.
      - alexeiz 11y ago
        Ah, Renaissance. Yes, they do seem to have some secret sauce that allows them to stay profitable. But I doubt that technology is their strong suite.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kafkaesq 11y ago
    Sure, those places are finicky and they ask tough questions. But can someone tell us where, exactly, this top .25% figure comes from? Other than the swirling mass of air about their heads, as they typed it? I'm not asking this to be snarky. It's just that people keep talking about the "top .1%" as if it's not just a thing, but a quantifiable, measurable thing. It's neither, of course; basically it's just a hunch people have. With an arbitrary number slapped on it to make it sound more, you know... authoritative. Meanwhile, some stories of the top .25% at Jane Street, getting busy at the task of finding the other top .25%: My interview is scheduled at 10:00am. However, I wait until 10:15am but no one called. Then I received an email saying the interviewer was wrapping up with an issue and he would call around 10:30am. Then I wait until 10:45 am still no one called. I received another email saying he was still working on the issue and will call in a minute. Then I continue to wait to 11:15am.… Another: They ended up calling 40 minutes late, the interviewer was very incompetent at even asking the questions. I found it very unprofessional and chose to not move on in the interviewing process after speaking with friends who told me this was not uncharacteristic of them. Source: glasdoor.com
sklogic 11y ago
I doubt there is such a thing as the "average people". There will always be some overlapping skill area and something one can learn from another, even if both got the same number of years of experience and very similar backgrounds.
kafkaesq 11y ago
Agree with you qualitatively about the need to get out of one's comfort zone, avoid "local maxima", and never consider oneself an expert. However: But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. There's so much noise, context, and (as you acknowledge) subjectivity in how performers are evaluated that a statement like "We hire only the top .25%" can't possibly have any meaning. Top 5% might be about as far as you can push it. But even at that level, at best it's just a metaphor. And by itself, it doesn't provide us with any tools to reliably determine membership in that category. Other than, of course, the tried-and-true method of throwing out a series of hoops for people to jump through over the phone, on your live coding portal, and at the whiteboard (ignoring all the built-in selection biases in this process: from whether candidates had had that very problem fed to them in another interview somewhere; to whether they spent 3 weeks to 3 months doing nothing but prepping for your hoops, day and night; to the simple matter of whether they're having a good day that day). And then stack-rank: "See, only 5% of email applicants made it through our phone screen and take home test (which we had to re-design midway through because we realized we weren't stating the requirements properly, but whatever). Then we brought in 10 or so of those for interviews, until basically we got tired of interviewing and decided we had to hire someone. Ergo, we only hire the top .5%."

kdamken 11y ago

This is very true and so important to your professional growth. There's a famous saying, "if you're the best one in the room, you're in the wrong room". At my last job I was the only developer at a small web agency, along with a designer and a project manager. Basically every problem and solution I had to figure out myself, and while I did that, due to time constraints I often had to go with just what worked, rather than figuring out the best of all possible options. At my current job, there are developers who know a lot more than me, and in the time I've spent working with them I've found I learn so much more so much more quickly than I did when I was working on my own.

alsetmusic 11y ago
I went from a job where I was the resident expert to one where everyone had unbelievable and baffling skills. I learned far more in the latter.
- defen 11y ago
  > unbelievable and baffling skills Any examples you can share?
  - anpk 11y ago
    Maybe he's still in the baffled stage

allsystemsgo 11y ago

Agreed. It creeps up on you too. Always be looking for the next great learning opportunity.

at-fates-hands 11y ago
While I completely agree with this point - as a front-end developer its entirely maddening trying to keep pace and learn what the "next big thing" is going to be. For instance. . . . After leaving a very small local company I was working at, this is what I found after doing a few months of research and interviews: I had several interviews, every single one for a front-end role. They ran the gamut of JS frameworks. Do you know Backbone? AngularJS, Polymer, Typescript, ReactJS? A combination of some? or none at all? Not a single interviewer asked me about jQuery or my "vanilla" JS skills - NONE. Every company big and small was using some kind of framework, in some capacity - albeit in vastly different ways. The point here is there's no way for you to predict how your next great learning experience is actually going to help you down the road. Our landscape is changing virtually by the hour. I have now given up on trying to have a learning opportunity whereby I can add some really good skills to my resume not only for now - but for future opportunities. It's made me a bit jaded that our industry is so fragmented that even by learning a new library or framework, you effectively remove yourself from consideration from a host of companies because you didn't pick the "sexy" framework
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  It's so easy to get pigeonholed. I am personally tired of the treadmill. Looking forward to transitioning into a leadership / project-manager role.

devonkim 11y ago

Can't upvote this enough. It is very important to recognize that "comfort zone" also means you must have room to fail, which is actually tough for companies to hire for because most companies are actually super risk averse when it comes to hiring. Why else would they want to hire people that know as much about their stack as a filter before asking questions about their potential? I went (foolishly, in hindsight) into areas on the thesis that a lot of organizations simply need some motivation from one or two highly capable people to raise the standards for everyone and that this form of leadership would be a good career path because people are oftentimes rewarded quite well for saving failing / ailing companies. Instead, I was beaten severely for trying to do create too much change for people that just wanted to a 9-to-5 job or (more importantly) given no projects with any risk or even much value even if it succeeded. I've come to realize that organizations without risk or without any sense of leaving their comfort zones are the same thing as people - these are beginner-expert organizations. These are companies who implement a working Hadoop cluster in production and give themselves a big pat on the back... in 2015. These are companies that implement some CMDB... in 2014. These are companies that are rolling out SOAP services seriously on a roadmap... for 2018. The aversion to risk leads inevitably to worse results than if you had accepted some failures, but this only makes sense anyway when your organization is capable of speed. And this becomes the ultimate chicken and the egg problem with large companies. My answer is that you must break your egg to create a new chicken - if you do not sacrifice something, you will lose everything for sure.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tunichtgut 11y ago

I dont know about that. Dont risk to much depending on your individual situation. Sometimes its better to be the king of the beggars, than to be the beggar of the kings. (improvement is always welcome, but be careful flipping corporations)

baldfat 11y ago

> If you work in an average company who hires average people and you are well above average you quickly risk becoming exactly that. I liked Steven Covey's 7 Habits take on this much more "Sharpen the Saw." This approach and wording puts all the blame on those around you. That is very good to think your above those around you and that you are above average. A) Nothing wrong with average half the people are below average B) Rating someone top 5% is totally a perception unless your in something that can be measured easily (Think fast 100m Dash or the author's bowling) C) Having hired dozens of people for different jobs I can tell you that my top 5% at higher usually ended up being drama and the one person I just hired because I needed a body ASAP ended up being hands down my best employee. (Look at how Google has changed their hiring practices because hiring is close to impossible to get right, think NCAA Brackets) D) Self-deception - Everyone believes their kid is above average and self-delusion inflates our own self-assessment. Blaming those around you give you a great out of self-responsibility.

dsp1234 11y ago
A) Nothing wrong with average half the people are below average This isn't necessarily true. Imagine a system where we could rate developers. There are 4 'A' developers (92,95,97,91) and 2 'B' developers (83, 85). Only 1/3 of the developers are 'below average' as compared to below median, and flip those numbers around and 2/3 are below average. This is kind of important when evaluating the type of company culture that you're in. Is it a place where there are a lot of 'top 5%' developers, and a short tail of good, but not great developers. Or is it a place where there are just one or two developers that doing 'A' work, but a long tail of developers doing solid, but not great work. The 'average' could be misleading in these cases.
- baldfat 11y ago
  Wow I have a Theology/Philosophy degree and I have seen what I can Theology/Philosophy gymnastics to make some wierd basic fact of life into a totally different thing. You might have missed your calling. Average = Average you have 100 developers 49 and below are bellow average :P

Delmania 11y ago

This is where I find myself, although my team is very small (2 people only). HN has gone a long way in eliminating my expert beginner syndrome. Looking at what people are doing, when all I'm doing is writing "textboxes over data", is both humbling and inspiring. I also find that sites like CodinGame, HackerRank, and Project Euler can also be helpful in combating that. Ultimately, I'm looking to make the leap into a more challenging job, but for now, these will have to do.

alexeiz 11y ago

> But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. What are those mythical companies? Really, I'd like to know. Name a few.

hiddencost 11y ago
RenTec and Jane Street come to mind.
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  I've never even heard of those companies..
  - hiddencost 11y ago
    Jane Street makes up 2% of all equity trading in the US (by dollars), on a typical day. They're a 400 person quantitative trading company. RenTec is a hedge fund that has done something like 30% annual gains over like 30+ years.
    - alexeiz 11y ago
      Ah, Renaissance. Yes, they do seem to have some secret sauce that allows them to stay profitable. But I doubt that technology is their strong suite.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- kafkaesq 11y ago
  Sure, those places are finicky and they ask tough questions. But can someone tell us where, exactly, this top .25% figure comes from? Other than the swirling mass of air about their heads, as they typed it? I'm not asking this to be snarky. It's just that people keep talking about the "top .1%" as if it's not just a thing, but a quantifiable, measurable thing. It's neither, of course; basically it's just a hunch people have. With an arbitrary number slapped on it to make it sound more, you know... authoritative. Meanwhile, some stories of the top .25% at Jane Street, getting busy at the task of finding the other top .25%: My interview is scheduled at 10:00am. However, I wait until 10:15am but no one called. Then I received an email saying the interviewer was wrapping up with an issue and he would call around 10:30am. Then I wait until 10:45 am still no one called. I received another email saying he was still working on the issue and will call in a minute. Then I continue to wait to 11:15am.… Another: They ended up calling 40 minutes late, the interviewer was very incompetent at even asking the questions. I found it very unprofessional and chose to not move on in the interviewing process after speaking with friends who told me this was not uncharacteristic of them. Source: glasdoor.com

sklogic 11y ago

I doubt there is such a thing as the "average people". There will always be some overlapping skill area and something one can learn from another, even if both got the same number of years of experience and very similar backgrounds.

kafkaesq 11y ago

Agree with you qualitatively about the need to get out of one's comfort zone, avoid "local maxima", and never consider oneself an expert. However: But at companies who are employing the top 5% of the top 5% you will probably won't even make the first round of phone screens. There's so much noise, context, and (as you acknowledge) subjectivity in how performers are evaluated that a statement like "We hire only the top .25%" can't possibly have any meaning. Top 5% might be about as far as you can push it. But even at that level, at best it's just a metaphor. And by itself, it doesn't provide us with any tools to reliably determine membership in that category. Other than, of course, the tried-and-true method of throwing out a series of hoops for people to jump through over the phone, on your live coding portal, and at the whiteboard (ignoring all the built-in selection biases in this process: from whether candidates had had that very problem fed to them in another interview somewhere; to whether they spent 3 weeks to 3 months doing nothing but prepping for your hoops, day and night; to the simple matter of whether they're having a good day that day). And then stack-rank: "See, only 5% of email applicants made it through our phone screen and take home test (which we had to re-design midway through because we realized we weren't stating the requirements properly, but whatever). Then we brought in 10 or so of those for interviews, until basically we got tired of interviewing and decided we had to hire someone. Ergo, we only hire the top .5%."