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I've never understood the fake shame one is supposed to feel at being productive, resourceful, and seeking to work with passion while removing speed limits. I'm

I've never understood the fake shame one is supposed to feel at being productive, resourceful, and seeking to work with passion while removing speed limits. I'm reminded of this article about three personalities and different stages of a startup: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/ There's no shame in being a Commando, or even a Rick. (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-best-decision-we-ever-made-4c0a99728fde/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-be...) And a business can certainly continue to get high value out of these personality types. If you are one, though, there are many practical things you need to learn. First, you need to remove temper and emotions from your work personality. I really recommend regular meditation for this. Also take vacations even when you don't think you need it (stress is a sneaky beast). You need to let go of some work you did that you hold dear, and realize that you will need to hand off to people who will not do things as perfectly or with such attention to detail, and may need structure and guardrails and speed limits that will frustrate you to no end. (E.g. Scrum, story points, more rigidity around testing, mandatory code review around trivial commits, security reviews.) The commandos need to make way for those who are able to march in step. My second piece of advice is, as a company grows you need to narrow your scope to a point where you can still be the most productive version of yourself, but you aren't carrying such a burden that you burn out. (Also my advice for managers who find themselves with a Rick kind character.) The main skills you need to learn for this are communication and diplomacy. If the company wants to get into a new area, full of unblazed trails, with a very high amount of risk and technical difficulty, as a commando this is perfect for you. TLDR if you are a tiger, better to find an area where you thrive vs pretending to be a mediocre wolf.

mikece 7y ago
A 10x shouldn't be ashamed of their talent or try to be something else; the biggest problem with 10x talent is that they are mismanaged in a way that doesn't treat them as the benevolent freak that they are. In some cases other folks are berated for not keeping up with the 10x; in others they drown in trying to manage the technical debt being created by someone who produces an order of magnitude more than them. When mismanaged, these effects on the rest of the team lead to a drop in morale and turnover... which will likely lead to management coaxing the 10x to deliver even more which only makes the problem worse.

mikece 7y ago

A 10x shouldn't be ashamed of their talent or try to be something else; the biggest problem with 10x talent is that they are mismanaged in a way that doesn't treat them as the benevolent freak that they are. In some cases other folks are berated for not keeping up with the 10x; in others they drown in trying to manage the technical debt being created by someone who produces an order of magnitude more than them. When mismanaged, these effects on the rest of the team lead to a drop in morale and turnover... which will likely lead to management coaxing the 10x to deliver even more which only makes the problem worse.