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> Why not only hire people 10x better than everyone else? It’s such a simple idea, it seems deceptively obvious. This trope is unadulterated bullshit. The whol
by Udo 10y ago
> Why not only hire people 10x better than everyone else? It’s such a simple idea, it seems deceptively obvious.
This trope is unadulterated bullshit. The whole article sometimes seems to border on a parody of the worst premises and shallowest-possible way of assembling and managing a (software) team.
There is certainly a feeling, especially when you're a manager or an unhappy team member, that there are 0.1X employees out there - perhaps even a great many. By all means, these people should be made aware of the problem and if necessary fired (heck, I had to do that a few times). But the most self-destructive assumption you can make as a manager is to unilaterally declare yourself an "A players only" team.
The performance of people depends on many factors, including working conditions, personal situation, management style, motivation to work on a certain project. The idea that somewhere there is a pool of global "A players" and you just need to find them is not only unrealistic and ignorant, it actively harms your company by turning it into a locker room popularity pageant. The people who thrive in such an environment of arrogance and self-promotion might be the ones you want (because they project a vacuous aura of success) but they're probably not the ones you actually need.
Furthermore, you don't really need to fill your company with "rockstars", if all you're doing is building another interchangeable ad-driven mobile app. It's perfectly acceptable, probably even preferrable, to have a base group of decently-performing "grunts" who can actually work on your app without feeling depressed after a month. People who aren't exactly highly motivated visionaries but have a stable 9-5 work output are more important than many people seem to think.
- kafkaesq 10y agoThis trope is unadulterated bullshit. Thanks for beating me to the punch. If they want to run a company on the basis of snappy, feel-good slogans ("We're all 10x-ers here!"), that's one thing. But the thing that gets me about the 10x-er line is that it isn't even in agreement with the original research (whatever you may choose to make of that research -- there was at least some research done on this, and its basic findings don't seem out of line with subjective, day-to-day observation). Unfortunately, those findings never said that top performers were "10x better than average." Rather, that they were 10x better than the worst performers, on the very bottom of the scale. So if there's anything all to the quantitative side of their findings -- it's that the "best" formers are merely... 3.16x better than average. Which, sadly, doesn't make for a catch slogan that you can use to emotionally manipulate people with. And if you ever brought up this inconvenient fact at an Expensify meeting -- next time you heard that it's time to go on the warpath, and root out all the lowly 8x-ers and 7x-ers -- I'm sure you'd be pegged as a disruptive, miserable, self-hating narcissist bent on bringing others down to your own level. And of course, immediately be put on PIP.
- flukus 10y agoI'm pretty sure negative 10x-ers exist though. The people who can build something but it then takes someone else 10 times longer to iron out all the bugs ad performance issues. In fact, I think these people are often mistaken for 10x-ers, especially in their own mind.
- kafkaesq 10y agoThere are extremes on both scales, to be sure. What makes the (far more common) negative outliers most vexing to deal with is not just that they're +10x-ers in their own minds -- but that they're mistaken for such in the minds of upper managers (and/or their investors) -- for a great, great while, in many cases. And having to explain to someone that they need to "flip" their +/- 10x bit on one of their "star performers" can be a really, really awkward situation to be in.