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>I think that a good person can do 5x more than an ok person, maybe even more This is really surprising to me, and I'm not sure how this can be the case. I wou

>I think that a good person can do 5x more than an ok person, maybe even more This is really surprising to me, and I'm not sure how this can be the case. I would imagine that this would be true of a high level position at the top of their game, able to define their own schedules & goals. For a typical worker with clearly defined short & long term objectives defined by the organization, how does one become 5X more productive? Clearly my heuristics about the tech industry are way out of step with reality. However, I could see something like this happening in my own field: academia. As a bioinformatics postdoc, the bread & butter work most of my colleagues do is routine, so they can hit their goals fairly predictably. My project, in comparison, is mostly ad-hoc, struggling to parse a novel dataset right on the edge of what is technically possible. My productivity is in the toilet, and I can imagine a different researcher in my position being 5-10x more productive. This is not how I imagined the tech industry working, though.

prepend 6y ago
I used to do a lot of programming and the multiples are really high, especially since bad programmers can have negative productivity (kind of like Hammerstein-Equord’s stupid and industrious quadrant). I remember a McKinsey study from the 80s or 90s that talked about 10x productivity but I can’t find it so maybe I’m misremembering. I don’t think people who actually try to measure this succeed well. I run away from anyone trying to precisely measure programmer productivity because it usually means some point haired boss will try to optimize on lines of code or something stupid. So for me, it’s a bit of a hunch but a strong hunch. I’ve worked in shops of 100 devs where a single dev wrote the entire authentication stack that teams couldn’t handle. And I have lots more stories like this. Nowadays I do “strategy” and I’d say the multiple is more than 10x in that there’s usually some magic mix to a good strategy that can’t be accomplished with giant committees and tons of hours. When it comes to creative tasks, I think the productivity leap from “ok” to “good” and from “good” to “super” is really high. Not every job is like this, but I think these are the most fun and so try to go towards them and away from commodity work. I have limited experience in academia but have seen authors quickly crank out really useful papers where teams have been working for months. I suspect that’s more about just having good alignment of capability and need instead of some magic or intrinsic productivity power. Personally my productivity is pretty sucky so I’m in a situation where I don’t meet my criteria but am lucky enough to get to work on cool stuff.
- eastbayjake 6y ago
  An updated perspective on how to think about "10x talent" in IT: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/its-time-to-reset-the-it-talent-model/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/its-time-to-reset-the-it...
- valarauko 6y ago
  Hmm. The way I see benchwork scientists being 'productive' is an endless slog - your cultures grow at their own schedule, and don't respect the boundaries of the work-life balance. Of course, this isn't true for everybody, but was one of the reasons pushing me away from benchwork towards bioinformatics. Our work also tends to be much more insular, gnawing away for years on our own little piece of the problem. I suppose I'm personally at a fairly "creative" point in my career - I have absolute free reign in my study, and my PI encourages it.

prepend 6y ago

I used to do a lot of programming and the multiples are really high, especially since bad programmers can have negative productivity (kind of like Hammerstein-Equord’s stupid and industrious quadrant). I remember a McKinsey study from the 80s or 90s that talked about 10x productivity but I can’t find it so maybe I’m misremembering. I don’t think people who actually try to measure this succeed well. I run away from anyone trying to precisely measure programmer productivity because it usually means some point haired boss will try to optimize on lines of code or something stupid. So for me, it’s a bit of a hunch but a strong hunch. I’ve worked in shops of 100 devs where a single dev wrote the entire authentication stack that teams couldn’t handle. And I have lots more stories like this. Nowadays I do “strategy” and I’d say the multiple is more than 10x in that there’s usually some magic mix to a good strategy that can’t be accomplished with giant committees and tons of hours. When it comes to creative tasks, I think the productivity leap from “ok” to “good” and from “good” to “super” is really high. Not every job is like this, but I think these are the most fun and so try to go towards them and away from commodity work. I have limited experience in academia but have seen authors quickly crank out really useful papers where teams have been working for months. I suspect that’s more about just having good alignment of capability and need instead of some magic or intrinsic productivity power. Personally my productivity is pretty sucky so I’m in a situation where I don’t meet my criteria but am lucky enough to get to work on cool stuff.

eastbayjake 6y ago
An updated perspective on how to think about "10x talent" in IT: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/its-time-to-reset-the-it-talent-model/ https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/its-time-to-reset-the-it...
valarauko 6y ago
Hmm. The way I see benchwork scientists being 'productive' is an endless slog - your cultures grow at their own schedule, and don't respect the boundaries of the work-life balance. Of course, this isn't true for everybody, but was one of the reasons pushing me away from benchwork towards bioinformatics. Our work also tends to be much more insular, gnawing away for years on our own little piece of the problem. I suppose I'm personally at a fairly "creative" point in my career - I have absolute free reign in my study, and my PI encourages it.