17 ms·

Moneyball teams

383 points by bdg 9y ago

jowiar 9y ago
One metaphor I've been kicking around lately is that a long-term sustainable software team needs a mix of "gas" (folks whose instincts are to churn ahead -- "move fast and break things", if you will) and "brakes" (folks whose instincts are to keep things under control, slow down and do things "right"), and an organization that knows how to balance the two.
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
Presumably you have teams of Web-stack ("Fullstack") developers. This caveat should have been put up front. Since "Best" is a vague loaded term it's more accurate to understand the problem that you're trying to solve. If you are creating a new web-standard or industry shifting technology then you absolutely need the best. If you are creating a new web based CRM for firefighters, then you need someone who is good, but probably doesn't do vector algebra in their head or [insert favorite discriminator for something hard.]
- deleted 9y ago
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- acdha 9y ago
  > Since "Best" is a vague loaded term it's more accurate to understand the problem that you're trying to solve. > > If you are creating a new web-standard or industry shifting technology then you absolutely need the best. There's a tension between these two sentences which is worth more consideration about what “best” really means and how it intersects with scalability. If you're working on a web standard, “best” tends to mean things like “experienced”, “works well with others”, and “broad and deep understanding of what the users do”. If you're working on a major new technology, it might be more likely that you really need someone who is incredibly good at a particular hard skill but it's still likely that if you have a problem in that class it will exceed any individual's capacity and the limiting factors will continue to be coordination between people, ability to maintain clean separation of responsibilities, etc. Think about something like LLVM – there's a ton of really hard work in compilers and optimization, it's had a significant impact in multiple parts of the industry, and while there are some people who rightly deserve a great deal of respect for work on those hard problems, a key part of the success which hasn't been virtuoso work at that level but rather keeping a design which is clean and extensible enough for so many different organizations to use and contribute to.
  - AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    Yes, fair point. Ended up stepping on myself there a bit. Maybe "Top of their discipline" would be a better way to say it.
    - acdha 9y ago
      Yeah, it's hard to talk about this since we're using a single term to convey multiple complex concepts.
      - bdg 9y ago
        This reminds me of a post on Less Wrong about the meanings of words and the idea we're targeting. http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/
ktRolster 9y ago
Or, hire the best, and make a team out of them. Or hire people with high potential and push them to reach it. Or, hire people who can get the job done. One thing for sure: if you have mind-numbing processes, "the best" will leave, and others will not reach their potential.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  In my view a good environment where people are allowed and challenged to improve will always beat any other alternative. A lot of people have potential if that potential is being nurtured. You can hire superstars but if your processes are bad, they lose their edge soon. Or leave.
- shallot_router 9y ago
  Yeah, these "don't do [hip thing], do [contrarian but normal/common sense] thing" articles (or the reverse of them) are becoming a bit tired. You should have good team-building and organizational skills and good technical hiring skills.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Everybody thinks they're doing the common-sense thing and not being contrarian, even if it's the hip thing.
    - shallot_router 9y ago
      Very true.
  - bdg 9y ago
    I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy the article format. I agree that one should have good team-building and technical skills. I also think there are other and possibly better ways to improve development team throughput besides "hiring the best".
- cbtacy 9y ago
  but... but.... management is HARD. [/snark]
m52go 9y ago
Thinking aloud...I wonder if the ancient Greek methods of sortition and ostracism have any place in building teams at companies. Obviously election (selecting people from a group) is hit-or-miss anyway...so maybe reverse-election (eliminating people from a group) could help.
- AceJohnny2 9y ago
  As a kid, one of the comic books I loved was the sci-fi Scrameustache [1]. One of the recurring characters was a society of aliens called "Galaxians", who's society was based on extreme sortition. Every week (or day?), they traded posts. One would be a squad leader one day and the janitor the next. Even as a kid, I realized this was a flawed concept, because it assumed experience and knowledge were fungible. Still, it was fun to think about... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrameustache https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrameustache [2] http://www.bedetheque.com/serie-682-BD-Scrameustache.html http://www.bedetheque.com/serie-682-BD-Scrameustache.html
m52go 9y ago
Thinking aloud...I wonder if the ancient Greek methods of sortition and ostracism have any place in building teams.
neogodless 9y ago
I'm four paragraphs in, and I don't want to get too hung up on grammatical errors, but it's making it hard to follow along on what point they are trying to make. > and was won against with teams spending over $100 million What does that mean? They spent less on their teams, and they lost? So they should spend more! > Once upon a time the ambitions of your company were exceeding the throughput capacity of your development teams. This is the ultimate goal of hiring... This sentence ends with the ultimate goal, but "this" seems to be referring to the previous sentence, when it really isn't. > If ambition growth constant I'm guessing they mean "is" constant?
- mediocrejoker 9y ago
  I am a native English speaker and I had a hard time following the point as well. I surmised from the title that the thesis was going to be "x number of decent developers who work together well can produce a product better/faster/cheaper than x great developers who don't get along" I think a bit of proof reading might make it easier to follow the argument in this article.
  - bdg 9y ago
    I had hoped to convince people that since hiring is about improving team throughput there may be better ways to do that besides simply saying "hire the best".
- bdg 9y ago
  Thanks for spotting those problems. I've updated the post. I've debated hiring a proof reader and may do that now as I passed this around my circle of friends before publishing.
dkarapetyan 9y ago
Hiring the best doesn't scale. Building teams does. The problem as with hiring the best is that almost no one knows how to build good teams. You will probably spend way more time resolving conflicts and dealing with politics than you'd like and in the end the software product will still be a steaming pile of technical debt.
- cbtacy 9y ago
  upvote x 1M
dvt 9y ago
Sooo I totally agree with this concept: that teamwork is more important than individual contribution; that we should focus on teams rather than metrics; and that teams are simply more resilient than other types of organizational structures. Buuut, then the author starts talking about some corporate-bs mumbo-jumbo "skills matrix". Moneyball is about "black swans" as Nassim Taleb would put it: unexpected outcomes that defy the current knowledge base. In other words, a conclusion that we could not have reached via deduction (but only perhaps abduction). But that goes completely against the "skills matrix" concept. The whole point of Moneyball is that the Oakland players were flawed given standard metrics -- in fact, most were (very calculated) gambles. >The final touch is to match these against levels of mastery. A lower level of skill may be someone who is largely uninformed of the subject, a middle level may be someone who can constantly use that skill well, and a high level is someone who is a mentor and thought-leader. Oh god, he really did miss the point. >With your new chart you are well prepared to decide where to make an investment. Should you hire for a specific weakness? Which team members get what training? Can we run peer mentorship? Do I have unchallenged experts who have no room to grow? Your answers are straight-forward now. Yep. Whoosh. The whole idea of a strategy like Moneyball is that answers are not straightforward. Moneyball is all about intuition vs. evidence. In the case of the A's, intuition seemed to trump evidence, but the author keeps telling us to collect more evidence (in the form of matrices, skill trees, or whatever else). Not only is that the categorically wrong approach, it's also not how you build good teams.
- GavinMcG 9y ago
  I wouldn't have said that Moneyball is all about intuition vs. evidence, with intuition trumping evidence. Rather the other way around: the A's acquired talent that the evidence suggested was underpriced, disrupting the traditional intuition-based scouting approach. It seems like you've got that backwards.
  - dvt 9y ago
    I really disagree, and I Podesta would also: [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201109/moneyball-it-s-intuition-vs-evidence https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201109/moneyb... [2] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/23/the-lessons-of-moneyball-for-big-data-analysis/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/23/the-l... According to Podesta: "Subjectivity ruled the day in evaluating players ... We had a completely new set of metrics that bore no resemblance to anything you’d seen. We didn’t solve baseball. But we reduced the inefficiency of our decision making."
georgeecollins 9y ago
I wish I could triple like this! Hire the best is lazy thinking. * I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star". * I have worked places where they only hire "superstars"-- and were pretty serious about paying for good talent and being picky-- and still failed for all kinds of organizational reasons. Teams with more role players, or more cohesion of goals would have performed better. *I have seen people recommended because they worked at "X" or worked on the "X" project, and then turn out to be completely underwhelming. Great teams don't always only have great people, and sometimes the great team has people on it who are one promotion away being at their level of incompetence.
- AceJohnny2 9y ago
  At a former (large, organizationally deficient) company, there was this small team of 5 people with very different specialties (and personalities). They were a "strike team" of sorts, tasked with helping out at a technical level different projects that were in trouble. They were excellent. They saved my team's integration of a camera co-processor in an SoC. But finally a re-org came around and some high-level manager didn't have a box under which to put them (or didn't have the right budget item to fit them in), and the team was dissolved. The guys were good in the teams they each landed in, but the synergy[1] was dead. Nowadays, my primary criteria for joining a team is the quality of the people and of the manager. I wish I could say I've seen other teams of the quality of that first one. [1] yeah I said it
  - marcofloriano 9y ago
    What's your criteria to measure "quality of the people", in this context?
    - AceJohnny2 9y ago
      Can I communicate with them well? (which is a huge topic in itself) Are the people I talked to focused and flexible? (this is not a contradiction) Do the team members refer to each other, and if so, in positive terms? Are the people interesting and curious?...
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Kenji 9y ago
If you say "the best" that also includes being good at teamwork. Great programmers write great interfaces anyway and are highly flexible.
curiouscats 9y ago
I agree, same sentiment from W. Edwards Deming: "A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together." http://quotes.deming.org/authors/W._Edwards_Deming/quote/10159 http://quotes.deming.org/authors/W._Edwards_Deming/quote/101...
jph 9y ago
Moneyball and Six Thinking Hats are excellent approaches to for people and roles. But they aren't enough. The key driver of top-tier teams is excellent ongoing safe communication. To build communications, use team goals (e.g. OKRs & KPIs), team ways of working (e.g. TEAM FOCUS), and team positions (e.g. scorecards). My notes about these are open source: https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/ https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/ Edit to explain abbreviations: * OKRs = Objectives & Key Results * KPIs = Key Performance Indicators * TEAM = Talk, Evaluate, Assist, Motivate * FOCUS = Frame, Organize, Collect, Understand, Synthesize
- rhizome 9y ago
  Is "TEAM FOCUS" an initialism, or is it there for EMPHASIS?
  - joeriel 9y ago
    Initialism: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/team_focus https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/team_focus
- pklausler 9y ago
  CARGO CULT BUZZWORD OVERLOAD
  - sebastos 9y ago
    For those wondering: Collect, Aggregate, Reduce and Generate Objectives to Cultivate Understanding Learning and Teamwork
  - jph 9y ago
    Ha! You're right, these can sound like cargo cult if someone doesn't know what they mean. These teamwork ideas are worthwhile IMHO. YMMV. :)
  - bdg 9y ago
    Totally, just imagine how people who don't know anything about tech feel when they don't grok our jargon!.
StreamBright 9y ago
These topics are orthogonal. You can hire the best and build teams at the same time.
- bdg 9y ago
  I agree with that. I attempted to describe a way for a company to improve throughput that isn't simply "hire the best".
Bahamut 9y ago
Going to paste this here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...
sesteel 9y ago
This is a pretty important lesson that gets lost at times. Teams with people of diversified passions work well; if everybody is super into data structures, UX, security, etc., then debates can rage and feelings can get hurt. When people on a team specialize differently, everybody can be a mentor to everybody else. To me, that is a great team to be on.
- bdg 9y ago
  Yes, and I also suspect this has lead to "we don't hire jerks" policies, which are great when you find someone who enters a conversation and talks down to everyone. That person fails a culture fit. However, there's another kind of person who just talks over you, doesn't put in the effort to communicate their ideas, or refuses to accept other ideas. These can remain hidden until tested in the depths of some technical discussion. They might pass a culture fit.
yuhong 9y ago
I remember when michaelochurch was on HN. I think even nostrademons admitted that closed allocation sucked.
jwineman 9y ago
Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zDlwVTWJLLwJ:https://bg-blog.com/2017/04/21/moneyball-teams/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zDlwVT...
Evolved 9y ago
One of my favorite movies, Miracle about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that upset the Soviets, had this dialogue that actually happened between Head Coach Herb Brooks and Assistant Head Coach Craig Patrick. I feel it applies here. Patrick: This is the final roster? You're kidding me, right? You're missing some of the best players. Brooks: I'm not looking for the best players, Craig. I'm looking for the right ones.
- caseysoftware 9y ago
  Which implies something major that everyone is glossing over: If the "right people" aren't the same as the "best people" are the criteria we're using for "best" correct?
  - SmellTheGlove 9y ago
    If you have a team of 6, sometimes the best individual 6 people are not the same group of 6 that you put out there to solve a problem. Let's continue to use hockey as an example, because I love ill-fitting sports analogies and I also love hockey. For sure, we already know we need 3 forwards, 2 defensemen and a goalie, so for the sake of argument, even if your 6th best skater is Wayne Gretzky, he's going to sit because you need to put Neuvirth in goal (to pick on my own team for a second). But let's think about forward lines only for just a second. Pittsburgh has Crosby and Malkin centering different lines, even though they're the best two guys on the entire team - they do the same job, they're playmakers first, goal scorers second (even though Crosby is the league's top goal scorer). Washington has Ovechkin playing the wing with Backstrom, because even though he's their best player, his job is to take a pass and fill the net. That's a really long-winded way for me to say that "best" has a situational component, and teams have compositional elements that often involve roles. The 10 best people at that level in the company may all fill the same role, but on a team of 6, maybe there's only 3 of that role, and the other 3 are complementary parts. Best is situational.
    - marme 9y ago
      Gretzky is great example because he was not the best player because he scored the most. He was the best because just him being on the ice lead to others scoring as well. Just being out there he was able to help the rest of the team score as well. Contrast this with a player like Kobe Bryant who was a great individual player but horrible team player. Kobe did not get along with his team mates and other than the points he put up on the board Kobe did not really contribute much to the Lakers. Kobe was such a ball hog that they refer to a missed shot that is rebounded and scored by the offense as a kobe assist because it was only way he was going to give up the ball
avip 9y ago
My model for ideal hiring are the Spurs. They consistently hire for talent and potential, provide the proper mentoring and conditions for the potential to fully materialise. "As you sow, so shall you reap". But few have the patience to sow nowadays. We rather buy ready-made in the grocery store.
- waterside81 9y ago
  I like the Spurs (San Antonio) as a better goal to work towards than the oft-cited A's because ultimately, Oakland didn't win the World Series, and lost in that year to the big spending Yankees. Even though the idea of "Moneyball" has merit in many applications, it always bugged me as a sports fan because Oakland never won any titles with that approach.
  - stupidhn 9y ago
    >It always bugged me as a sports fan because Oakland never won any titles with that approach There is too much variance (and too much league parity) in the Playoffs short series format. Moneyball gets you there, where all the gate is gravy.
- Rylinks 9y ago
  Most companies cannot have their employees sign multi-year contracts. Outside of sports, there is a much bigger risk of your competitors poaching people after they've developed.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Most companies cannot have their employees sign multi-year contracts. No, most companies prefer not to make multiyear commitments to employees. They could enter into multi-year contracts with employees (and they do, with execs, with fairly expensive buyout provisions), but they don't want to for most non-executive employees.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Presumably that's always a risk regardless of whether you hired someone junior and trained them or whether you hired someone already skilled. As long as you're doing the standard things that help you retain talent (like paying market rate, providing good opportunities, etc.), there should be no reason to worry, right? The only companies that should be worried about "poaching"[1] are the ones, for example, who are not paying market rate, have crappy projects, provide no career advancement opportunities. I've never heard of a talented employee leaving a company for literally no reason. 1: Which by the way, is a pretty offensive term--we're not deer or wild game owned by some feudal lord.
uranian 9y ago
> Software Development is often about human factors as much as it is the code. Totally true that. But the title almost suggests you can build a winning team out of a random bunch of average developers. Although the best developer is an illusion as it doesn't exist as such, just 'building teams' doesn't really say much to me too. I've seen very terrible teams that should have been replaced with just 1 good developer.. Personally I prefer to hire the best fit for the job, whether he or she will be part of a team or not.
cpsempek 9y ago
This reminds me of Reed Hasting's culture deck (he even uses a baseball team as a metaphor when describing Netflix's hiring practices). To further the analogy, Netflix would best be described by the Yankees--pay top-of-market for those who have proven they are the best at their role. This has been effective, for both the Yankees and Netflix. But, the interesting caveat, as alluded to by the OP and the moneyball A's (and other teams), is that this might not be an optimal strategy.
- OpenDrapery 9y ago
  I think the Yankees model is a (possibly reaching) metaphor for capitalism. All the capital concentrates in a few hands. But where are all the "best" people supposed to prove themselves? That's why you see so many posts in this thread like "I worked on the perfect team for a short period, but alas, it was short lived." Building the gestalt is always going to flame out. Right at the moment when you realize you've assembled something special is when your team members start getting traded to the Yankees. That's why the only sustainable model is culture, culture, culture. Always be striving for the perfect combination of team members. Keep the talent pipeline active, and if you have someone who doesn't fit, get them out of there.
  - cpsempek 9y ago
    Interesting, to belabor the sports team metaphor, culture does indeed seem to be an alternative to max salaries. C.f., Spurs being one of the most winningest teams in the past couple decades, Tom Brady taking pay cuts in order to maintain and foster a dynasty, and Steph Curry doing similar. In all these cases, a great coach (read, CEO) has fostered a strict but burgeoning cultures which rewards its members through a shared success in what they love and not an individual's compensation. Of course this analogy can be dangerous. Athlete's get paid extraordinary sums, even while sitting on a bench 99% of the season. Whereas many employees have to worry about their own compensation simply to survive, and such selling of culture as a supplement to compensation won't always put food in your mouth (and thus can be exploitative). Nonetheless, I appreciate your comment, you brought up an interesting view on workplace culture that I never thought about.
techman9 9y ago
This reminds me a lot of Dan Luu's article, in which he makes the same "Moneyball" comparison: https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
matchagaucho 9y ago
The Moneyball metaphor is useful. The "best" player in baseball (Ty Cobb) batted .366 over 24 seasons. For every 10 attempts (at bats), he "failed" 6.5 times. Moneyball teams are really about hiring professionals who consistently bat .300. If each player is batting .300, then the results will compound (more RBIs and runs for the team).
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I am a bit surprised if this is new information to anyone who has managed teams and/or thought seriously about the challenges that job has to face. When ever I hear an executive making the assumption that "software engineers" are a fungible resource and they will just move 6 over from the project that is on track and humming along to the group that is behind and in trouble I know they are clueless about managing high performance teams. Every team needs a mix of people and when done well the talents and skills of the individual members complement each other and create an effective whole. Too many people trying to drive, or too many people unwilling to drive as an example can both leave the team floundering and unproductive. When someone asks me what I think their priority should be as a manager, their day to day job if you will, it is looking for ways to improve this spread of talents to minimize overlap and cover gaps.
lordnacho 9y ago
It happens now and again that the best team has very few of the best players: - Denmark at Euro 92. The only world class player, Michael Laudrup, decided he was boycotting the coach. His brother was a fairly decent striker, and future Man Utd legend Peter Schmeichel was in goal, but everyone else was a journeyman. - Greece at Euro 2004. Nobody from a top team in a top league, but Otto Rehagel managed to coach them to victory. Not amateurs, of course, but certainly not superstars. - Leicester City last year in the Premiership. Nobody on the team was a real target for a top club, except maybe Schmeichel junior, also in goal. But they played a great season and one of them got voted player of the year. And Vardy beat the scoring streak record. What's interesting is how they fell apart this season under the same coach, who then got sacked and replaced by someone who has partially brought back the magic. The rest of the time, the winners are built around a small number of world class players, and competent squaddies. This is typical of US teams, where you have a salary cap, meaning the superstars will be spread out, and you need to be efficient in paying for the squaddies that are appropriate for that star's game.
- what_ever 9y ago
  So once in Premier League since it's inception (1991 IIRC) and twice in Euros since I don't ever remember when should be that surprising?
hardwire 9y ago
I hate these opinionated pieces about what works and what doesn't mainly BECAUSE they're not backed up by rigorous analysis (it's all a bunch of assumptions and untested conclusions) nor statistical proof. So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof. You can have an all-start team that kicks ass and you can have a bunch of mediocre developers kick ass. Same for a mix of both. In the absence of analysis or statistical proof, why do I care to listen to your opinion?
- grzm 9y ago
  > So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof. Be part of the solution. Participate in the community in a constructive, productive way. Submit articles you find substantive. Contribute good comments. Upvote submissions and comments you find useful. Flag submissions you find not useful. Each of us has a role to play in curating HN content.
- bdg 9y ago
  I'm glad that you read the entire post and it excited you enough to create an account and participate on HN. I'm a big fan of having data. What data would you have liked? What collection method would have satisfied you?
Macsenour 9y ago
Boss: I only want to hire the guy who worked on XXXX Project. me: That project was 2 years late and 1.2 million over budget. Boss: Still, he did something right.
rsync 9y ago
I think we need to be critical of the Moneyball narrative - and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime ... The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value. Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results. I am skeptical of that conclusion in every other realm and I don't think baseball (or hiring, as is the case in this article) should be exempt from that skepticism. Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ...
- jordanlev 9y ago
  Reminds me of this great article from last year about a couple of stats nerds who started managing a minor league baseball team using sabremetrics: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happens-when-baseball-stats-nerds-run-a-pro-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happe...
- bsder 9y ago
  > Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ... The human brain is also very good at misleading itself. Statistics is how you avoid that. Do remember that Moneyball happened in an era where statistics was just becoming more ubiquitous. Bill James was collecting and collating statistics from a bunch of volunteers who used to snail mail him the scoring sheets from the games. He only quit doing that in 1988 because suddenly there was a flood of statistics. So, from weak data to Moneyball in less than 10 years is actually fairly impressive.
  - stupidhn 9y ago
    >So, from weak data to Moneyball in less than 10 years is actually fairly impressive. And it's taken over every sport thereafter: soccer, hockey, football and basketball.
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ryandrake 9y ago
Another way to look at it is: What causes projects to succeed or fail? I've seen my share of failed projects throughout my career (as a participant and as a co-worker watching it happen). By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak, or because they didn't hire "rockstar" programmers, or because the engineers didn't go to Stanford. They failed because of things like requirements growth, unrealistic schedules, emotion-based/gut-based (rather than measurement-based) product decisions, and external factors (market changing and company couldn't react). If companies spent more time worrying about these things and less time worrying whether their engineering interview candidates can balance a binary tree on a whiteboard, we might see hiring practices change.
- snarf21 9y ago
  I agree with everything you've said so I won't add to it. There is an interesting anecdote that I love. Some number of years ago there used to be a show called EcoChallenge. It was made by Marc Burnett but before Survivor. It was simply an adventure race but no politics and no contrived voting. Each team of 4 must be co-ed. There is a starting point, there is a stopping point and there are way stations along the way. Simply go from start to end hitting the way stations. Everything else was left up to the teams. The one big twist is that you can't win unless ALL of the team hits each way point. Teams are allowed to race 24x7. One of the last years it was on tv, a team of navy seals bombed out and a team of 3 playboy playmates went further then they did. The team that won (from NZ) had a sick teammate and spent two days nursing their teammate into passable health. They loaded up all that person's gear split 1.3x, 1.3x, 1.3x, 0x and set off. They rocketed past all of the other teams and won by over a day. This is what real success looks like. A determined team laser focused on the exact same goal and doing whatever it takes to get there.
  - devonkim 9y ago
    A bit more on topic, I was asked to read a book on leadership and teamwork that's a bit of a cliche these days but Coach Wooden's Leadership Game Plan for Success covers a lot of these ideas specifically in a sports context. A lot of leadership texts revolve around sports out of sheer ubiquity in subject matter among business leaders culturally but beyond some pop sociology type of research I really don't pay much attention to them in a business setting. Why? In much of the world of software, day-to-day work is not a race against a competing team towards the exact same goal as much as it is a race against oneself and against market inertia whether that may be the default mode of failure or convergence to an equilibrium point that needs to be readjusted as the team discovers the hidden rules of a game. In fact, a lot of business is probably a lot closer to something more sadistic and cruel in gross mechanics like from Takashi Miike's 2014 As the Gods Will (and the manga of the same) - arbitrary filters where the rules are very clear only until after people have died. Some stages test raw individual skills while others test cooperation. And in some cases it didn't actually matter if you had either of those because "luck" is the bigger factor (the fact few in practice agree upon these slack variables to achieving business success shows how random things are for survivorship moreso than controllable factors like skill and effort)
runeks 9y ago
Only hiring the best is inherently unsustainable, because it implies a need for "other companies" to train people into being the best, and only then are you willing to hire them. The greatest companies are those who offer an atmosphere in which good developers can grow into the best developers. The worst companies are those who believe they can hire people from great companies, and consequently transform into great companies themselves. Great companies produce value; poor companies consume it.
- mighty_atomic_c 9y ago
  This is an interesting point. Companies that try to "hire to greatness" have a steep fee to pay for their hiring approach, and it might not work for reasons that cannot possibly be squashed into, and recognized from, the sloppy "greatness" scalar used to score the possible team members. As you said, cultivation of expertise is a better approach, and I'm happy that where I currently work fosters this carefully and deliberately.
HiroshiSan 9y ago
Seth Godin actually talks about this in his book the dip where he mentions that the best means the best in their world (he goes on to explain the concept of their world). Highly recommend the read.
- bdg 9y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation, I'll add it to my reading list!
afpx 9y ago
The 'best' is so subjective as to be meaningless. I have worked with probably 500 software engineers, and I have been the best of all of them. (Well, one guy was probably as good as me.) But, maybe this is only because I value things that a lot of other people don't? My criteria are just different. I have led teams that developed software resulting in 4 successful (another subjective word, but in this case, acquired) startups. I designed and implemented 14 products. All together these products were used by hundreds of millions of people. Some of them are still used 10+ years later. But, I still can't always convince hiring managers to hire me. I don't have a blog (don't care). I don't have a github (don't have time). After being turned down some say that I'm 'too mellow' or that I'm too abstract or too specific or that I didn't answer their questions (usually one specific) the way that they wanted me to. Again, it's all subjective. At the end of the day, it's just a fashion show. And, when it comes to work, I'm not into fashion (I have a laser focus on the product, its market suitability, its functionality, and and its market success). Basically, people hire the ones that they like. And, I believe the evidence shows that most managers prefer to hire people who are worse than them, or at least only better in certain ways. Corporations are just glorified hierarchies, remember. So, if you get turned down a lot, take it as a compliment.
- peteretep 9y ago
  > I have been the best of all of them What's your metric for that? How would you have known if you weren't?
  - afpx 9y ago
    Haha - exactly.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Well, that's the problem isn't it? All you have are confirmation and survivor biases to work with. You're going to get a lousy outcome. Someone with far more practical experience than you might sound paranoid about some things you don't even think about, and blasé about others (because they have ways to mitigate the problem if it actually happens). You won't know enough to realize why they aren't on board with your priorities, and you will make conclusions that have no basis in reality. You've only known this person for 45 minutes. You've known yourself for decades. Which one are you going to assume is the idiot in this situation? How often are you going to be wrong? And how would you ever know if you were wrong? You just kicked this person out of your life because you didn't like their answer. If they become lead developer at your biggest competitor, are you even going to remember their name?
jtraffic 9y ago
I used to play basketball almost every week at the university gym. There were these guys in their 60's who still played with 19-25 year olds and routinely won. I asked one of them if he saw one particular thing young people tended to ignore. He said, without hesitation, "the team game." There is probably some bias, the young guys probably didn't play quite as hard as they would have otherwise, but I'm really not convinced that accounts for the entire story. Maybe it's just as simple as: interaction effects on teams are often stronger than main effects.
hunglee2 9y ago
Excellent start to a post but really needs a follow up. I'd love to hear OP's ideas on practical steps to take in order to effectively execute his team based hiring model.
reubenswartz 9y ago
One thing that struck me from Ed Catmull's book on Pixar, Creativity Inc[1] was how much effort they put into trying to get people to work together effectively and how important that was in the final results, versus the talents of the "super stars". After the Disney acquisition, they kept the companies separate, but basically got rid of a bunch of red tape at Disney Animation and injected a bunch of Pixar cultural practices. The DA team went from mediocre results (many people thought Pixar would just shut them down) to producing hit movies. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FUZQYBO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FUZQYBO/
cowardlydragon 9y ago
The biggest problem with open market hiring: The best people aren't on the open job market. They'll get scooped up by their network. You're hiring the best of new grads, bullshit artists, people that just moved, extenuating circumstances, or didn't impress anyone they ever worked with.

383 points by bdg 9y ago

One metaphor I've been kicking around lately is that a long-term sustainable software team needs a mix of "gas" (folks whose instincts are to churn ahead -- "move fast and break things", if you will) and "brakes" (folks whose instincts are to keep things under control, slow down and do things "right"), and an organization that knows how to balance the two.

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

Presumably you have teams of Web-stack ("Fullstack") developers. This caveat should have been put up front. Since "Best" is a vague loaded term it's more accurate to understand the problem that you're trying to solve. If you are creating a new web-standard or industry shifting technology then you absolutely need the best. If you are creating a new web based CRM for firefighters, then you need someone who is good, but probably doesn't do vector algebra in their head or [insert favorite discriminator for something hard.]

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
acdha 9y ago
> Since "Best" is a vague loaded term it's more accurate to understand the problem that you're trying to solve. > > If you are creating a new web-standard or industry shifting technology then you absolutely need the best. There's a tension between these two sentences which is worth more consideration about what “best” really means and how it intersects with scalability. If you're working on a web standard, “best” tends to mean things like “experienced”, “works well with others”, and “broad and deep understanding of what the users do”. If you're working on a major new technology, it might be more likely that you really need someone who is incredibly good at a particular hard skill but it's still likely that if you have a problem in that class it will exceed any individual's capacity and the limiting factors will continue to be coordination between people, ability to maintain clean separation of responsibilities, etc. Think about something like LLVM – there's a ton of really hard work in compilers and optimization, it's had a significant impact in multiple parts of the industry, and while there are some people who rightly deserve a great deal of respect for work on those hard problems, a key part of the success which hasn't been virtuoso work at that level but rather keeping a design which is clean and extensible enough for so many different organizations to use and contribute to.
- AndrewKemendo 9y ago
  Yes, fair point. Ended up stepping on myself there a bit. Maybe "Top of their discipline" would be a better way to say it.
  - acdha 9y ago
    Yeah, it's hard to talk about this since we're using a single term to convey multiple complex concepts.
    - bdg 9y ago
      This reminds me of a post on Less Wrong about the meanings of words and the idea we're targeting. http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/

ktRolster 9y ago

Or, hire the best, and make a team out of them. Or hire people with high potential and push them to reach it. Or, hire people who can get the job done. One thing for sure: if you have mind-numbing processes, "the best" will leave, and others will not reach their potential.

maxxxxx 9y ago
In my view a good environment where people are allowed and challenged to improve will always beat any other alternative. A lot of people have potential if that potential is being nurtured. You can hire superstars but if your processes are bad, they lose their edge soon. Or leave.
shallot_router 9y ago
Yeah, these "don't do [hip thing], do [contrarian but normal/common sense] thing" articles (or the reverse of them) are becoming a bit tired. You should have good team-building and organizational skills and good technical hiring skills.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Everybody thinks they're doing the common-sense thing and not being contrarian, even if it's the hip thing.
  - shallot_router 9y ago
    Very true.
- bdg 9y ago
  I'm sorry to hear you didn't enjoy the article format. I agree that one should have good team-building and technical skills. I also think there are other and possibly better ways to improve development team throughput besides "hiring the best".
cbtacy 9y ago
but... but.... management is HARD. [/snark]

m52go 9y ago

Thinking aloud...I wonder if the ancient Greek methods of sortition and ostracism have any place in building teams at companies. Obviously election (selecting people from a group) is hit-or-miss anyway...so maybe reverse-election (eliminating people from a group) could help.

AceJohnny2 9y ago
As a kid, one of the comic books I loved was the sci-fi Scrameustache [1]. One of the recurring characters was a society of aliens called "Galaxians", who's society was based on extreme sortition. Every week (or day?), they traded posts. One would be a squad leader one day and the janitor the next. Even as a kid, I realized this was a flawed concept, because it assumed experience and knowledge were fungible. Still, it was fun to think about... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrameustache https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrameustache [2] http://www.bedetheque.com/serie-682-BD-Scrameustache.html http://www.bedetheque.com/serie-682-BD-Scrameustache.html

m52go 9y ago

Thinking aloud...I wonder if the ancient Greek methods of sortition and ostracism have any place in building teams.

neogodless 9y ago

I'm four paragraphs in, and I don't want to get too hung up on grammatical errors, but it's making it hard to follow along on what point they are trying to make. > and was won against with teams spending over $100 million What does that mean? They spent less on their teams, and they lost? So they should spend more! > Once upon a time the ambitions of your company were exceeding the throughput capacity of your development teams. This is the ultimate goal of hiring... This sentence ends with the ultimate goal, but "this" seems to be referring to the previous sentence, when it really isn't. > If ambition growth constant I'm guessing they mean "is" constant?

mediocrejoker 9y ago
I am a native English speaker and I had a hard time following the point as well. I surmised from the title that the thesis was going to be "x number of decent developers who work together well can produce a product better/faster/cheaper than x great developers who don't get along" I think a bit of proof reading might make it easier to follow the argument in this article.
- bdg 9y ago
  I had hoped to convince people that since hiring is about improving team throughput there may be better ways to do that besides simply saying "hire the best".
bdg 9y ago
Thanks for spotting those problems. I've updated the post. I've debated hiring a proof reader and may do that now as I passed this around my circle of friends before publishing.

dkarapetyan 9y ago

Hiring the best doesn't scale. Building teams does. The problem as with hiring the best is that almost no one knows how to build good teams. You will probably spend way more time resolving conflicts and dealing with politics than you'd like and in the end the software product will still be a steaming pile of technical debt.

cbtacy 9y ago
upvote x 1M

dvt 9y ago

Sooo I totally agree with this concept: that teamwork is more important than individual contribution; that we should focus on teams rather than metrics; and that teams are simply more resilient than other types of organizational structures. Buuut, then the author starts talking about some corporate-bs mumbo-jumbo "skills matrix". Moneyball is about "black swans" as Nassim Taleb would put it: unexpected outcomes that defy the current knowledge base. In other words, a conclusion that we could not have reached via deduction (but only perhaps abduction). But that goes completely against the "skills matrix" concept. The whole point of Moneyball is that the Oakland players were flawed given standard metrics -- in fact, most were (very calculated) gambles. >The final touch is to match these against levels of mastery. A lower level of skill may be someone who is largely uninformed of the subject, a middle level may be someone who can constantly use that skill well, and a high level is someone who is a mentor and thought-leader. Oh god, he really did miss the point. >With your new chart you are well prepared to decide where to make an investment. Should you hire for a specific weakness? Which team members get what training? Can we run peer mentorship? Do I have unchallenged experts who have no room to grow? Your answers are straight-forward now. Yep. Whoosh. The whole idea of a strategy like Moneyball is that answers are not straightforward. Moneyball is all about intuition vs. evidence. In the case of the A's, intuition seemed to trump evidence, but the author keeps telling us to collect more evidence (in the form of matrices, skill trees, or whatever else). Not only is that the categorically wrong approach, it's also not how you build good teams.

GavinMcG 9y ago
I wouldn't have said that Moneyball is all about intuition vs. evidence, with intuition trumping evidence. Rather the other way around: the A's acquired talent that the evidence suggested was underpriced, disrupting the traditional intuition-based scouting approach. It seems like you've got that backwards.
- dvt 9y ago
  I really disagree, and I Podesta would also: [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201109/moneyball-it-s-intuition-vs-evidence https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/plato-pop/201109/moneyb... [2] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/23/the-lessons-of-moneyball-for-big-data-analysis/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/09/23/the-l... According to Podesta: "Subjectivity ruled the day in evaluating players ... We had a completely new set of metrics that bore no resemblance to anything you’d seen. We didn’t solve baseball. But we reduced the inefficiency of our decision making."

georgeecollins 9y ago

I wish I could triple like this! Hire the best is lazy thinking. * I have been on teams that were not considered the best until they had success, then everyone on the team was a "star". * I have worked places where they only hire "superstars"-- and were pretty serious about paying for good talent and being picky-- and still failed for all kinds of organizational reasons. Teams with more role players, or more cohesion of goals would have performed better. *I have seen people recommended because they worked at "X" or worked on the "X" project, and then turn out to be completely underwhelming. Great teams don't always only have great people, and sometimes the great team has people on it who are one promotion away being at their level of incompetence.

AceJohnny2 9y ago
At a former (large, organizationally deficient) company, there was this small team of 5 people with very different specialties (and personalities). They were a "strike team" of sorts, tasked with helping out at a technical level different projects that were in trouble. They were excellent. They saved my team's integration of a camera co-processor in an SoC. But finally a re-org came around and some high-level manager didn't have a box under which to put them (or didn't have the right budget item to fit them in), and the team was dissolved. The guys were good in the teams they each landed in, but the synergy[1] was dead. Nowadays, my primary criteria for joining a team is the quality of the people and of the manager. I wish I could say I've seen other teams of the quality of that first one. [1] yeah I said it
- marcofloriano 9y ago
  What's your criteria to measure "quality of the people", in this context?
  - AceJohnny2 9y ago
    Can I communicate with them well? (which is a huge topic in itself) Are the people I talked to focused and flexible? (this is not a contradiction) Do the team members refer to each other, and if so, in positive terms? Are the people interesting and curious?...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Kenji 9y ago

If you say "the best" that also includes being good at teamwork. Great programmers write great interfaces anyway and are highly flexible.

curiouscats 9y ago

I agree, same sentiment from W. Edwards Deming: "A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together." http://quotes.deming.org/authors/W._Edwards_Deming/quote/10159 http://quotes.deming.org/authors/W._Edwards_Deming/quote/101...

jph 9y ago

Moneyball and Six Thinking Hats are excellent approaches to for people and roles. But they aren't enough. The key driver of top-tier teams is excellent ongoing safe communication. To build communications, use team goals (e.g. OKRs & KPIs), team ways of working (e.g. TEAM FOCUS), and team positions (e.g. scorecards). My notes about these are open source: https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/ https://joelparkerhenderson.github.io/ Edit to explain abbreviations: * OKRs = Objectives & Key Results * KPIs = Key Performance Indicators * TEAM = Talk, Evaluate, Assist, Motivate * FOCUS = Frame, Organize, Collect, Understand, Synthesize

rhizome 9y ago
Is "TEAM FOCUS" an initialism, or is it there for EMPHASIS?
- joeriel 9y ago
  Initialism: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/team_focus https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/team_focus
pklausler 9y ago
CARGO CULT BUZZWORD OVERLOAD
- sebastos 9y ago
  For those wondering: Collect, Aggregate, Reduce and Generate Objectives to Cultivate Understanding Learning and Teamwork
- jph 9y ago
  Ha! You're right, these can sound like cargo cult if someone doesn't know what they mean. These teamwork ideas are worthwhile IMHO. YMMV. :)
- bdg 9y ago
  Totally, just imagine how people who don't know anything about tech feel when they don't grok our jargon!.

StreamBright 9y ago

These topics are orthogonal. You can hire the best and build teams at the same time.

bdg 9y ago
I agree with that. I attempted to describe a way for a company to improve throughput that isn't simply "hire the best".

Bahamut 9y ago

Going to paste this here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

sesteel 9y ago

This is a pretty important lesson that gets lost at times. Teams with people of diversified passions work well; if everybody is super into data structures, UX, security, etc., then debates can rage and feelings can get hurt. When people on a team specialize differently, everybody can be a mentor to everybody else. To me, that is a great team to be on.

bdg 9y ago
Yes, and I also suspect this has lead to "we don't hire jerks" policies, which are great when you find someone who enters a conversation and talks down to everyone. That person fails a culture fit. However, there's another kind of person who just talks over you, doesn't put in the effort to communicate their ideas, or refuses to accept other ideas. These can remain hidden until tested in the depths of some technical discussion. They might pass a culture fit.

yuhong 9y ago

I remember when michaelochurch was on HN. I think even nostrademons admitted that closed allocation sucked.

jwineman 9y ago

Cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zDlwVTWJLLwJ:https://bg-blog.com/2017/04/21/moneyball-teams/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zDlwVT...

Evolved 9y ago

One of my favorite movies, Miracle about the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that upset the Soviets, had this dialogue that actually happened between Head Coach Herb Brooks and Assistant Head Coach Craig Patrick. I feel it applies here. Patrick: This is the final roster? You're kidding me, right? You're missing some of the best players. Brooks: I'm not looking for the best players, Craig. I'm looking for the right ones.

caseysoftware 9y ago
Which implies something major that everyone is glossing over: If the "right people" aren't the same as the "best people" are the criteria we're using for "best" correct?
- SmellTheGlove 9y ago
  If you have a team of 6, sometimes the best individual 6 people are not the same group of 6 that you put out there to solve a problem. Let's continue to use hockey as an example, because I love ill-fitting sports analogies and I also love hockey. For sure, we already know we need 3 forwards, 2 defensemen and a goalie, so for the sake of argument, even if your 6th best skater is Wayne Gretzky, he's going to sit because you need to put Neuvirth in goal (to pick on my own team for a second). But let's think about forward lines only for just a second. Pittsburgh has Crosby and Malkin centering different lines, even though they're the best two guys on the entire team - they do the same job, they're playmakers first, goal scorers second (even though Crosby is the league's top goal scorer). Washington has Ovechkin playing the wing with Backstrom, because even though he's their best player, his job is to take a pass and fill the net. That's a really long-winded way for me to say that "best" has a situational component, and teams have compositional elements that often involve roles. The 10 best people at that level in the company may all fill the same role, but on a team of 6, maybe there's only 3 of that role, and the other 3 are complementary parts. Best is situational.
  - marme 9y ago
    Gretzky is great example because he was not the best player because he scored the most. He was the best because just him being on the ice lead to others scoring as well. Just being out there he was able to help the rest of the team score as well. Contrast this with a player like Kobe Bryant who was a great individual player but horrible team player. Kobe did not get along with his team mates and other than the points he put up on the board Kobe did not really contribute much to the Lakers. Kobe was such a ball hog that they refer to a missed shot that is rebounded and scored by the offense as a kobe assist because it was only way he was going to give up the ball

avip 9y ago

My model for ideal hiring are the Spurs. They consistently hire for talent and potential, provide the proper mentoring and conditions for the potential to fully materialise. "As you sow, so shall you reap". But few have the patience to sow nowadays. We rather buy ready-made in the grocery store.

waterside81 9y ago
I like the Spurs (San Antonio) as a better goal to work towards than the oft-cited A's because ultimately, Oakland didn't win the World Series, and lost in that year to the big spending Yankees. Even though the idea of "Moneyball" has merit in many applications, it always bugged me as a sports fan because Oakland never won any titles with that approach.
- stupidhn 9y ago
  >It always bugged me as a sports fan because Oakland never won any titles with that approach There is too much variance (and too much league parity) in the Playoffs short series format. Moneyball gets you there, where all the gate is gravy.
Rylinks 9y ago
Most companies cannot have their employees sign multi-year contracts. Outside of sports, there is a much bigger risk of your competitors poaching people after they've developed.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Most companies cannot have their employees sign multi-year contracts. No, most companies prefer not to make multiyear commitments to employees. They could enter into multi-year contracts with employees (and they do, with execs, with fairly expensive buyout provisions), but they don't want to for most non-executive employees.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Presumably that's always a risk regardless of whether you hired someone junior and trained them or whether you hired someone already skilled. As long as you're doing the standard things that help you retain talent (like paying market rate, providing good opportunities, etc.), there should be no reason to worry, right? The only companies that should be worried about "poaching"[1] are the ones, for example, who are not paying market rate, have crappy projects, provide no career advancement opportunities. I've never heard of a talented employee leaving a company for literally no reason. 1: Which by the way, is a pretty offensive term--we're not deer or wild game owned by some feudal lord.

uranian 9y ago

> Software Development is often about human factors as much as it is the code. Totally true that. But the title almost suggests you can build a winning team out of a random bunch of average developers. Although the best developer is an illusion as it doesn't exist as such, just 'building teams' doesn't really say much to me too. I've seen very terrible teams that should have been replaced with just 1 good developer.. Personally I prefer to hire the best fit for the job, whether he or she will be part of a team or not.

cpsempek 9y ago

This reminds me of Reed Hasting's culture deck (he even uses a baseball team as a metaphor when describing Netflix's hiring practices). To further the analogy, Netflix would best be described by the Yankees--pay top-of-market for those who have proven they are the best at their role. This has been effective, for both the Yankees and Netflix. But, the interesting caveat, as alluded to by the OP and the moneyball A's (and other teams), is that this might not be an optimal strategy.

OpenDrapery 9y ago
I think the Yankees model is a (possibly reaching) metaphor for capitalism. All the capital concentrates in a few hands. But where are all the "best" people supposed to prove themselves? That's why you see so many posts in this thread like "I worked on the perfect team for a short period, but alas, it was short lived." Building the gestalt is always going to flame out. Right at the moment when you realize you've assembled something special is when your team members start getting traded to the Yankees. That's why the only sustainable model is culture, culture, culture. Always be striving for the perfect combination of team members. Keep the talent pipeline active, and if you have someone who doesn't fit, get them out of there.
- cpsempek 9y ago
  Interesting, to belabor the sports team metaphor, culture does indeed seem to be an alternative to max salaries. C.f., Spurs being one of the most winningest teams in the past couple decades, Tom Brady taking pay cuts in order to maintain and foster a dynasty, and Steph Curry doing similar. In all these cases, a great coach (read, CEO) has fostered a strict but burgeoning cultures which rewards its members through a shared success in what they love and not an individual's compensation. Of course this analogy can be dangerous. Athlete's get paid extraordinary sums, even while sitting on a bench 99% of the season. Whereas many employees have to worry about their own compensation simply to survive, and such selling of culture as a supplement to compensation won't always put food in your mouth (and thus can be exploitative). Nonetheless, I appreciate your comment, you brought up an interesting view on workplace culture that I never thought about.

techman9 9y ago

This reminds me a lot of Dan Luu's article, in which he makes the same "Moneyball" comparison: https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/

matchagaucho 9y ago

The Moneyball metaphor is useful. The "best" player in baseball (Ty Cobb) batted .366 over 24 seasons. For every 10 attempts (at bats), he "failed" 6.5 times. Moneyball teams are really about hiring professionals who consistently bat .300. If each player is batting .300, then the results will compound (more RBIs and runs for the team).

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I am a bit surprised if this is new information to anyone who has managed teams and/or thought seriously about the challenges that job has to face. When ever I hear an executive making the assumption that "software engineers" are a fungible resource and they will just move 6 over from the project that is on track and humming along to the group that is behind and in trouble I know they are clueless about managing high performance teams. Every team needs a mix of people and when done well the talents and skills of the individual members complement each other and create an effective whole. Too many people trying to drive, or too many people unwilling to drive as an example can both leave the team floundering and unproductive. When someone asks me what I think their priority should be as a manager, their day to day job if you will, it is looking for ways to improve this spread of talents to minimize overlap and cover gaps.

lordnacho 9y ago

It happens now and again that the best team has very few of the best players: - Denmark at Euro 92. The only world class player, Michael Laudrup, decided he was boycotting the coach. His brother was a fairly decent striker, and future Man Utd legend Peter Schmeichel was in goal, but everyone else was a journeyman. - Greece at Euro 2004. Nobody from a top team in a top league, but Otto Rehagel managed to coach them to victory. Not amateurs, of course, but certainly not superstars. - Leicester City last year in the Premiership. Nobody on the team was a real target for a top club, except maybe Schmeichel junior, also in goal. But they played a great season and one of them got voted player of the year. And Vardy beat the scoring streak record. What's interesting is how they fell apart this season under the same coach, who then got sacked and replaced by someone who has partially brought back the magic. The rest of the time, the winners are built around a small number of world class players, and competent squaddies. This is typical of US teams, where you have a salary cap, meaning the superstars will be spread out, and you need to be efficient in paying for the squaddies that are appropriate for that star's game.

what_ever 9y ago
So once in Premier League since it's inception (1991 IIRC) and twice in Euros since I don't ever remember when should be that surprising?

hardwire 9y ago

I hate these opinionated pieces about what works and what doesn't mainly BECAUSE they're not backed up by rigorous analysis (it's all a bunch of assumptions and untested conclusions) nor statistical proof. So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof. You can have an all-start team that kicks ass and you can have a bunch of mediocre developers kick ass. Same for a mix of both. In the absence of analysis or statistical proof, why do I care to listen to your opinion?

grzm 9y ago
> So grow up HN, and stop this trend of B.S. articles about what works and what doesn't that have no associated analytical or statistical proof. Be part of the solution. Participate in the community in a constructive, productive way. Submit articles you find substantive. Contribute good comments. Upvote submissions and comments you find useful. Flag submissions you find not useful. Each of us has a role to play in curating HN content.
bdg 9y ago
I'm glad that you read the entire post and it excited you enough to create an account and participate on HN. I'm a big fan of having data. What data would you have liked? What collection method would have satisfied you?

Macsenour 9y ago

Boss: I only want to hire the guy who worked on XXXX Project. me: That project was 2 years late and 1.2 million over budget. Boss: Still, he did something right.

rsync 9y ago

I think we need to be critical of the Moneyball narrative - and not just because Oakland hasn't actually performed that well under the MB regime ... The understood narrative is that dummies were choosing players based on broken heuristics and that proper, sober heuristics would uncover hidden value. Put another way: If you remove human decision-making and replace it with algorithms you will achieve better results. I am skeptical of that conclusion in every other realm and I don't think baseball (or hiring, as is the case in this article) should be exempt from that skepticism. Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ...

jordanlev 9y ago
Reminds me of this great article from last year about a couple of stats nerds who started managing a minor league baseball team using sabremetrics: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happens-when-baseball-stats-nerds-run-a-pro-team.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/what-happe...
bsder 9y ago
> Having read MB the book (and seen the movie, for what that's worth) I wonder if Billy Beane is missing the potential for deeper insights that only human brains can put together. It is the thing that we are good at, after all ... The human brain is also very good at misleading itself. Statistics is how you avoid that. Do remember that Moneyball happened in an era where statistics was just becoming more ubiquitous. Bill James was collecting and collating statistics from a bunch of volunteers who used to snail mail him the scoring sheets from the games. He only quit doing that in 1988 because suddenly there was a flood of statistics. So, from weak data to Moneyball in less than 10 years is actually fairly impressive.
- stupidhn 9y ago
  >So, from weak data to Moneyball in less than 10 years is actually fairly impressive. And it's taken over every sport thereafter: soccer, hockey, football and basketball.

deleted 9y ago

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ryandrake 9y ago

Another way to look at it is: What causes projects to succeed or fail? I've seen my share of failed projects throughout my career (as a participant and as a co-worker watching it happen). By a huge margin, most of the failed project did not fail because the engineering team was weak, or because they didn't hire "rockstar" programmers, or because the engineers didn't go to Stanford. They failed because of things like requirements growth, unrealistic schedules, emotion-based/gut-based (rather than measurement-based) product decisions, and external factors (market changing and company couldn't react). If companies spent more time worrying about these things and less time worrying whether their engineering interview candidates can balance a binary tree on a whiteboard, we might see hiring practices change.

snarf21 9y ago
I agree with everything you've said so I won't add to it. There is an interesting anecdote that I love. Some number of years ago there used to be a show called EcoChallenge. It was made by Marc Burnett but before Survivor. It was simply an adventure race but no politics and no contrived voting. Each team of 4 must be co-ed. There is a starting point, there is a stopping point and there are way stations along the way. Simply go from start to end hitting the way stations. Everything else was left up to the teams. The one big twist is that you can't win unless ALL of the team hits each way point. Teams are allowed to race 24x7. One of the last years it was on tv, a team of navy seals bombed out and a team of 3 playboy playmates went further then they did. The team that won (from NZ) had a sick teammate and spent two days nursing their teammate into passable health. They loaded up all that person's gear split 1.3x, 1.3x, 1.3x, 0x and set off. They rocketed past all of the other teams and won by over a day. This is what real success looks like. A determined team laser focused on the exact same goal and doing whatever it takes to get there.
- devonkim 9y ago
  A bit more on topic, I was asked to read a book on leadership and teamwork that's a bit of a cliche these days but Coach Wooden's Leadership Game Plan for Success covers a lot of these ideas specifically in a sports context. A lot of leadership texts revolve around sports out of sheer ubiquity in subject matter among business leaders culturally but beyond some pop sociology type of research I really don't pay much attention to them in a business setting. Why? In much of the world of software, day-to-day work is not a race against a competing team towards the exact same goal as much as it is a race against oneself and against market inertia whether that may be the default mode of failure or convergence to an equilibrium point that needs to be readjusted as the team discovers the hidden rules of a game. In fact, a lot of business is probably a lot closer to something more sadistic and cruel in gross mechanics like from Takashi Miike's 2014 As the Gods Will (and the manga of the same) - arbitrary filters where the rules are very clear only until after people have died. Some stages test raw individual skills while others test cooperation. And in some cases it didn't actually matter if you had either of those because "luck" is the bigger factor (the fact few in practice agree upon these slack variables to achieving business success shows how random things are for survivorship moreso than controllable factors like skill and effort)

runeks 9y ago

Only hiring the best is inherently unsustainable, because it implies a need for "other companies" to train people into being the best, and only then are you willing to hire them. The greatest companies are those who offer an atmosphere in which good developers can grow into the best developers. The worst companies are those who believe they can hire people from great companies, and consequently transform into great companies themselves. Great companies produce value; poor companies consume it.

mighty_atomic_c 9y ago
This is an interesting point. Companies that try to "hire to greatness" have a steep fee to pay for their hiring approach, and it might not work for reasons that cannot possibly be squashed into, and recognized from, the sloppy "greatness" scalar used to score the possible team members. As you said, cultivation of expertise is a better approach, and I'm happy that where I currently work fosters this carefully and deliberately.

HiroshiSan 9y ago

Seth Godin actually talks about this in his book the dip where he mentions that the best means the best in their world (he goes on to explain the concept of their world). Highly recommend the read.

bdg 9y ago
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll add it to my reading list!

afpx 9y ago

The 'best' is so subjective as to be meaningless. I have worked with probably 500 software engineers, and I have been the best of all of them. (Well, one guy was probably as good as me.) But, maybe this is only because I value things that a lot of other people don't? My criteria are just different. I have led teams that developed software resulting in 4 successful (another subjective word, but in this case, acquired) startups. I designed and implemented 14 products. All together these products were used by hundreds of millions of people. Some of them are still used 10+ years later. But, I still can't always convince hiring managers to hire me. I don't have a blog (don't care). I don't have a github (don't have time). After being turned down some say that I'm 'too mellow' or that I'm too abstract or too specific or that I didn't answer their questions (usually one specific) the way that they wanted me to. Again, it's all subjective. At the end of the day, it's just a fashion show. And, when it comes to work, I'm not into fashion (I have a laser focus on the product, its market suitability, its functionality, and and its market success). Basically, people hire the ones that they like. And, I believe the evidence shows that most managers prefer to hire people who are worse than them, or at least only better in certain ways. Corporations are just glorified hierarchies, remember. So, if you get turned down a lot, take it as a compliment.

peteretep 9y ago
> I have been the best of all of them What's your metric for that? How would you have known if you weren't?
- afpx 9y ago
  Haha - exactly.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Well, that's the problem isn't it? All you have are confirmation and survivor biases to work with. You're going to get a lousy outcome. Someone with far more practical experience than you might sound paranoid about some things you don't even think about, and blasé about others (because they have ways to mitigate the problem if it actually happens). You won't know enough to realize why they aren't on board with your priorities, and you will make conclusions that have no basis in reality. You've only known this person for 45 minutes. You've known yourself for decades. Which one are you going to assume is the idiot in this situation? How often are you going to be wrong? And how would you ever know if you were wrong? You just kicked this person out of your life because you didn't like their answer. If they become lead developer at your biggest competitor, are you even going to remember their name?

jtraffic 9y ago

I used to play basketball almost every week at the university gym. There were these guys in their 60's who still played with 19-25 year olds and routinely won. I asked one of them if he saw one particular thing young people tended to ignore. He said, without hesitation, "the team game." There is probably some bias, the young guys probably didn't play quite as hard as they would have otherwise, but I'm really not convinced that accounts for the entire story. Maybe it's just as simple as: interaction effects on teams are often stronger than main effects.

hunglee2 9y ago

Excellent start to a post but really needs a follow up. I'd love to hear OP's ideas on practical steps to take in order to effectively execute his team based hiring model.

reubenswartz 9y ago

One thing that struck me from Ed Catmull's book on Pixar, Creativity Inc[1] was how much effort they put into trying to get people to work together effectively and how important that was in the final results, versus the talents of the "super stars". After the Disney acquisition, they kept the companies separate, but basically got rid of a bunch of red tape at Disney Animation and injected a bunch of Pixar cultural practices. The DA team went from mediocre results (many people thought Pixar would just shut them down) to producing hit movies. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FUZQYBO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FUZQYBO/

cowardlydragon 9y ago

The biggest problem with open market hiring: The best people aren't on the open job market. They'll get scooped up by their network. You're hiring the best of new grads, bullshit artists, people that just moved, extenuating circumstances, or didn't impress anyone they ever worked with.