7 ms·

Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top

80 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

Sindrome 6y ago
Life is absurd
kkoncevicius 6y ago
I got interested after reading this and retold the story about the chef to my wife, in passing, and she replied with a good point, which basically is: "This is not surprising, the video of a house wife making food is accessible to a higher number of people. A lot fewer people would be able to follow someone who is number one in the world." Might that be the answer at hand? It certainly seems like it applies to programming videos. If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular.
- jsty 6y ago
  > If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular. I would instinctively have thought material conveying the basics would be the most viewed in the long run - since skill is cumulative, everyone at some point will have had to learn the basics, and only those who succeeded would go on to view intermediate content
  - xzel 6y ago
    If you’re looking at an online course I agree the basics will be watched more often (as well as due to people not completing the course). But if you’re looking at something like cooking videos I’d expect the videos of people cooking cool things would get more views. People love food porn and want to watch something exciting about cooking but probably won’t watch a video about knife basics because it’s not as engaging to most people. That’s what I loved so much about Alton Brown and especially Good Eats, he makes so many mundane kitchen things exciting. Compare that to Thomas Keller’s Master Class, which is incredibly informative and I’d recommend it to anyone, but also significantly lower energy and you really have to want to learn the stuff to watch him julienne carrots for 5 minutes.
    - utucuro 6y ago
      Good coincidence. I'm about to subscribe to Master Class (International 2 for 1 offer) and was looking forward to watching Thomas Keller among others. Watched 2 of Massimo Bottura's lectures with a guest pass and found it useful and informative, looks like I'll enjoy Keller as well...
- sjg007 6y ago
  Seems he does mac and cheese so no? Seems accessible. Maybe people don't know this guy is the best chef in the world, I didn't so I would not have searched him out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEDcWd78U1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEDcWd78U1g
- hinkley 6y ago
  I would presume that the peak would be closer to 1 std deviation above mean, since improvement usually means looking at things you can’t do but aren’t scared to try. The woodworking videos I watch are often things I can’t do.
  - kkoncevicius 6y ago
    I assume a bit of opposite - that the number of potential viewers decrease as the quality and skill necessary to follow the content increases. Basically: people with skill level 1 std above the mean are still able to follow content that is 1 std below the mean. But the opposite is not true.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      The average person will find a video about grilled cheese to be condescending, and won’t enjoy watching it at all. Watching a video about roast lamb or soufflé might inspire me to go to a restaurant instead.
    - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
      Having done quite a lot of it professionally once I can say that the details of high level cooking are both mostly understandable to a lay person and incredibly boring to someone who isn't specifically invested in the process of cooking.
cgrealy 6y ago
This is crazy, but hear me out... Is it possible that cooking and making-videos-about-cooking are two entirely different skill sets? The funny thing is I don't disagree with the premise of the article. But I doubt I could think of a worse metric to measure success than YouTube views.
- jmcgough 6y ago
  Agreed. I checked out the channels he mentioned. Some put out videos that are completely unwatchable. The first video that loads on Massimo Bottura's channel is a portrait-style recording of a livestream shot with a phone and covered in emojis, it's not designed for the format of youtube at all. I would much rather watch someone like Adam Ragusea (https://youtu.be/SDpCzJw2xm4 https://youtu.be/SDpCzJw2xm4), who may not be as good as Bottura, but is much better at cooking than I am and can communicate information well and produces engaging videos.
  - jsilence 6y ago
    Exactly this! I much rather like to watch a video of someone who is better than me, but reachable than someone off the charts and beyond my capabilities. Also Adam is really good at making videos. edit: typo
  - cgrealy 6y ago
    > but is much better at cooking than I am and can communicate information well This is a really good point. To put it in simple geek numerical terms, if I'm level 20, I need someone who's level 50 to show me how to get to level 30 or 40. Someone who is level 100 would be wasted on me, and I'd probably learn less because it's so far out of my league!
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    Besides the entertainment value and communication skills getting to Adam’s level and even beyond is achievable by most people who are willing to put in some time. Getting to Bottura’s level is not. If someone wants to get better at cooking they would gain far more value form watching what is essentially a decent home cook rather than a top chef. The same thing can also be applied to developers most people would gain far more from watching an average developer with good communication skills solving a problem than a top 0.1% talent. Because quite likely the way and speed you think at and your problem solving skills are far closer to them than to someone who designed a programming language or built an entire framework from scratch.
beaner 6y ago
Not really a problem on the face of it. If literally everyone in a company is talented, how can that company have any hierarchy or structure without it being claimed that talented people frequently don't rise to the top within the company? Some talented people must be at the bottom by definition.
- inetknght 6y ago
  Why must a company have any hierarchy? Why "must" there be a bottom and a top?
  - PopsiclePete 6y ago
    So everyone is equally empowered to make decision on the strategic direction of the company? If I got hired tomorrow at Google, I should just be able to decide to kill off Android and Chrome, yeah?
  - jsty 6y ago
    Well they don't "have to", but completely non-hierarchical / flat organisations have a habit of either (1) descending into anarchy, or (2) developing hidden hierarchies.
  - nnp7000 6y ago
    Because explicit hierarchy is almost always better than implicit hierarchy, which is what happens at a "self-organizing" company. A company may start off with good intentions but without some hierarchy past a certain size or tribal connections (e.g. friends and co-founders), then either: a) Progress slows to a crawl with everyone trying to reach consensus on everything. This also leads to less accountability. b) Everyone doing their own thing leading to an operational mess and constantly repeated work. c) An implicit power structure forming and working behind the scenes which then breeds an atmosphere of paranoia and stress. I'm reminded of these tweets about Valve from Richard Geldreich: https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
  - perl4ever 6y ago
nickjj 6y ago
It's interesting the author uses DHH in the example because DHH is not a ghost online. Besides Rails itself, he has almost half a million Twitter followers and even a lot of non-Rails developers know who he is. It really is surprising at how little views his videos get, especially the ones where he spends 20 minutes going over his thought process while going over a feature of Basecamp. This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation in how he applies something to a real world use case. I guess it really boils down to discoverability being mostly about SEO (aka. picking good titles) and how much love you get from the algorithm to push your content in front of folks. But I have a feeling it has a lot more to do with the algorithm at this point due to the sheer number of videos out there. I know I struggle on YouTube (programming / tech topics), even with 11k subs and posting a new video every week consistently, most of the time I'm getting like 400-600 views after the first day and some videos get more views over time depending on how popular the topic is. These are usually videos with 100% or close to 100% upvotes and lots of positive comments. It's super hard to get to the point where you consistently get a lot of views. I've only had a few videos get more than 100k+ views after all this time.
- creamytaco 6y ago
  "This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation". I weep for the world where this is true. DHH found a niche and through copious application of the "worse is better" approach, became famous. That in itself makes him neither interesting nor particularly talented. The real tragedy is hundreds of genius engineers posting eye-opening material in their personal blogs, that I have little time to fully follow much less digest, being invisible to the masses.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    > I weep for the world where this is true It's too late to edit my comment but I should have been more specific and included the word "web" in there instead of having it applied to all developers. I've watched all of DHH's YouTube videos and ignoring his opinionated views on things I think it would be hard to say he's not a good developer. His thought process is very clear and the code he writes (at least in the videos I've seen) seems good, especially since it's in an older code base that's really running in production at scale and not a little toy example to make it look good on video. In my mind, a talented developer is more than someone who can think of and implement great algorithms. It's pulling together many things (coding chops, ability to communicate, API design, thoughtfulness of the code quality, being able to turn the code into something nice for either developers or app features depending on who the audience is, etc.) and IMO DHH hits all of these marks, so it's surprising to me at how little views his videos gets. I wonder if that's why he stopped making them.
booleandilemma 6y ago
There’s being talented and then there’s optimizing for being seen. People of the former don’t necessarily do the latter. Famous people usually have a strong desire to be famous.
georgebonnr 6y ago
Maybe one of the lessons we're learning from removing all the gatekeepers is that Michelin stars aren't a truly objective form of assigning value. Or, value doesn't exist in a vacuum -- it depends on the application, and maybe the applications aren't what gatekeepers say they are.
deleted 6y ago
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tibiahurried 6y ago
Very true. What makes an individual rise to the top is networking and politics. Skills don't really matter.
jandrese 6y ago
Being talented at your job doesn't necessarily mean you are talented in climbing the corporate ladder or rising to the top of a media landscape. They are two different skills.
moksly 6y ago
Being talented at something doesn’t mean you’re talented at marketing and selling it. The headline is interesting but the article can easily be summed up as: “McDonalds isn’t the highest quality restaurant, but it’s very popular, and, I have nothing to add to that beyond pointing it out.”.
- bawolff 6y ago
  Or at teaching it.
  - moksly 6y ago
    Or that. And beyond that, different people learn different ways. If your target is to teach programming 101, you’re probably going to have more views than someone teaching people how to do banking related cobol.
fvdessen 6y ago
Or maybe being the best Cook in the world is a very different skill than making good youtube videos. I tried to watch some of Massimo Bottura's videos, and they don't compare well to what you would find in a top youtube channel in terms of presentation & storytelling. I mean he's just posting badly compressed screen captures of vertically recorded tik tok videos ...
j_walter 6y ago
Talent of a specific activity isn't enough. When did we define "rising to the top" as getting the most YouTube views? I have seen great restaurants (food wise) fail because they didn't have a good location or the right advertising. I've seen engineers fail because they couldn't articulate their ideas in a way that made people realize their value. It's not always about your talent, but how to make others realize you are talented.
meowsinin 6y ago
Who’s to say the ‘random housewives’ are not comparable cooks in their niches than the ‘top chef’? There are major cultural barriers to joining commercial kitchens, so there’s likely a large contingent of incredibly talented cooks that don’t work in restaurants. And also, as another commenter points out, perhaps the ‘random housewives’ have more accessible content.
- meowsinin 6y ago
  By cultural barriers I mean culture of heavy drug and alcohol use, plus yelling, etc. isn’t acceptable to everyone.
klyrs 6y ago
Weird. A lot of this is focused on youtube stats, and conflates "success getting youtube views" with "skill as a chef." Their #1 chef in the world, with all his accolades, is indubitably "at the top." Michelin, San Pellegrino, etc., all agree. He's risen to the top of the chef world, end of story. But what about the youtube world? Is he a talented youtuber, or is he merely a mediocre youtuber? Well, I kinda hate the format, so I won't try to judge that myself. But he's being compared to talented youtubers who are less-acclaimed as chefs. From what I gather, youtube is popular among people who want to learn how to do something. I know what it takes to make a fancy meal, and I know what it takes to get food on the table after a long day's work, in time to get it down my kid's gullet before bathtime rolls around. These goals are not compatible. If I wanted somebody to tell me how to make dinner, I'd watch the unacclaimed housewife. Later on in the article, the author bemoans the difficulty that good chefs have rising to the top of their world. And, yeah, marketing certainly plays a role in that. But so does the extremely low-margin, high-competition nature of restauranting.
Spinnaker_ 6y ago
I watched some of the Michelin star chef videos. They are pretty terrible. Camera is shaky, audio is all over the place, random people come in frame and start conversations, instructions are not at all clear, etc. They seem to have an appropriate amount of views.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The difference is that the YouTuber's job is to make good videos, while the Michelin-starred chefs job is cooking and they couldn't care less about actually making a good video?
dannykwells 6y ago
"Again, I don’t really have any insightful takeaways here. I’ve just been noticing myself slowly realizing that the best don’t always rise to the top, and these are the examples that have been sticking out to me." The lack of insight is key here, because really this isn't a hard problem at the surface. You need a compelling story, or product, that resonates with people. The more people it resonates with, the larger your audience. Also, it never occurred to the author that DHH or Massimo don't *want" a big audience. They might want to explain their work to true fans and die hards, and not have to make it broadly accessible to the point where it could get 1M+ views. It's not about talent. It could be a choice.
DeusExMachina 6y ago
> So… arguably the best chef in the entire world. On YouTube. Showing you how he cooks. How he thinks. > Yet his videos only get 10-20k views. That might sound like a lot on the surface, but pay attention to view counts on YouTube and you’ll find random housewives consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views for their cooking videos. Most people don't want to cook at chef level. They want to learn easy recipes to cook home, often with little time investment. Even now that I know this guy exists, I have no interest in watching his videos. But be sure that when I am looking for an answer to an easy cooking question, I'll be finding one of those "random housewives". > My core point is that there are people like DHH, like Massimo, who should be getting way more views on their videos, given the quality of the content they’re producing and what they’ve done to promote that content. Do you disagree with that? Yes. The Massimo Bottura has a total of 13 videos from months ago, with random titles that mean nothing like "Let's burn the house down". DHH has 12 videos published years ago, and they are not even all about software. Why should I watch those? Because he is famous? Most of Bottura's videos are live, produced with a hand held phone and no preparation. I'm not disputing his knowledge, but is presentation is dismal. Where is the quality of the content? Where is the effort in promoting? I see very little of both. It's also quite ironic that the two people he takes as examples raised at the top of their respective professions, invalidating his point. They are just not the best teachers/presenters, which is not their core skill, and that's why they are not at the top of that hierarchy. Being good at something does not automatically grant you the right to be revered in every other field.
disabled 6y ago
Yeah, the algorithms are meant to keep you online more, and are not there to give you good content, as in entertainment, let alone things that you need to know. It is ironic, given how much data is hoarded about us. In the article meritocracy is mentioned. Meritocracy is a joke in America. People at the top basically have it rigged for their kids, even worse than what aristocracy brought (which offered a leisurely life). The Meritocracy Myth by Yale Law Professor Stephen McNamee is a good read regarding this. It is shocking, as in the statistics.
_0qft 6y ago
People said I was talented, and I always loved math and physics. I went to prep school for math and physics, and my emotional state did not allow me to pass the class. In the modern world, we value merit and motivation over everything else, we don't care about aspirations or self-determination. There will always be a barrier or a filter to stop people from doing what they really want to do. We want people to work hard to prove they want something, and we don't really value what people like, we only value competitiveness. Problem is, we don't understand a lot about motivations, and merit is a myth. People will always fall back to classical argument of natural selection and survival of the fittest to explain how the world is unfair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy In the end, "raising to the top" or asserting one's position in the world, and not feeling like a loser, those things don't matter. There are plenty of people who find their place in the world, but who will still feel like they're missing something once they reach it.
deleted 6y ago
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andyxor 6y ago
So true
uncomputation 6y ago
In the style of “DH6” the author linked, I don’t agree with the unwritten assumption he seems to make: that the quality of a video is as simple as the qualifications of the person making it. Nor is it even the “density” of information provided. The overall quality of a YouTube video also involves: accessibility, SEO, inviting/entertaining narration or personality, and even some technical meta-quality stuff like the quality of the camera, audio, etc. All of this factors into the overall experience of the viewer and the skill of content creation is oftentimes very different from the skill of, for example, cooking, or coding. Not all masters are teachers.
anm89 6y ago
"Don't rise to the top" "Doesn't get a lot of youtube views" "Has three michelin stars" I think we can stop reading now.
yoav 6y ago
blogger discovers most people don’t have the same preferences that they do. Is shocked and confused by this. Writes a post about it. Why is this on the front page?
suifbwish 6y ago
This is because it takes a lot more than talent to rise to the top. Rising to the top is 99% hard work and 1% talent (being just knowing where to strategically focus the efforts
- mempko 6y ago
  No, it's because it takes more luck, talent isn't enough. Imaging you have a normal distribution on talent, and a uniform distribution on luck. Lets say the ranking process incorporates 95% talent and 5% luck. So you have a final score of 0.95talent+ 0.05luck. In a field with millions of people, to be at the top 100, you not only have to have a lot of talent, but you also have to have a lot of luck. It's not enough to just have talent. Because if you have the top talent but no luck, in a million people you would be ranked at 50,000 because 95% of the selection process considers merit, the other 5% is luck. To be in the top 100, you would need to be very talented and be in the top 1% of lucky people. With different talent/luck ratios the numbers obviously change, but even in a system where you are 95% merit based, luck still plays a HUGE role to be at the very top. It's math. And keep in mind there are billions of people in this world. Programming alone has millions of people.
  - suifbwish 6y ago
    I agree but disagree. A tendency towards strategically placed hard work is a talent of its own and to have that tendency is a form of luck, although there are those who believe they are self made and others are lazy. There really isn’t anything we are capable of doing that can’t be broken down into luck and innate ways of interacting with that luck.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
Its absolutely true that the best doesn't always rise to the top, but not for the reasons cited in this article. The best chef isn't necessarily the best Youtube video maker, or even the best (or most entertaining) instructional cook. However, it is true that even if you were the best Youtube video maker and the best, most entertaining chef in the world, there's no guarantee you'd be at the top (or even ahead of whatever cooking video Youtube's algorithm is suggesting to the masses).
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  >So… arguably the best chef in the entire world. On YouTube. Showing you how he cooks. How he thinks. >Yet his videos only get 10-20k views. That might sound like a lot on the surface, but pay attention to view counts on YouTube and you’ll find random housewives consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views for their cooking videos. >I think you have to consider that some sort of failure. An expected failure by the vast majority of youtube watchers to seek this kind of excellence.
Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
There's a short story by Chekhov "The First-class Passenger" that depicts a similar sentiment from the year 1886 :)
smitty1e 6y ago
Figured out some years ago that: Doing the work is half the challenge; marketing the work is the other half.
dsq 6y ago
I would go so far as to say that for talent to succeed in spite of vested interest, there has to be a situation of real perceived crisis and breakdown in order to overcome inertia and cut through the clouds of b-s that usually envelope everything. Otherwise there just isn't enough impetus to ditch 'safe' mediocrity.
kbos87 6y ago
What interests me about the question being posed here is how we humans are so attracted to binaries and superlatives. "Best", "most talented", even the concept of "success" are all mental shortcuts that the world is so attached to but are less and less effective in the world we live in. Who is to say what those things even mean in a time when there is nearly infinite choice, whether you are watching cooking videos, product reviews, or anything else? The author points out that there are "random housewives" with 100x the reach of Michelin star rated chefs. This strikes me as a great example of the fact that the people and content who rise to the top today get there through a complicated dance of specific talents (some cooking talent, probably great screen presence) and choosing a broad addressable market. You could almost argue that this is more meritocratic than the world we used to live in where a select few had the ability to tell the rest of us what the "best" was.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>The best frequently don’t rise to the top True, but in life, there are people who do things because they have to do things, and then there are people who do things because they want to do things... Highly spiritually advanced people (and I don't claim to be one of them -- far from!) -- no longer do things for a reward -- that's because to them, the act of doing and the reward for the doing -- are one in the same... That is, because they live life at such a high level of self-expression -- they have unified action and reward. For them, there is no time delay between the action and the reward... To use a analogy borrowed from psychology, think of this as having attained "Self-Actualization" in Maslow's "hierarchy of needs"... People at that level -- no longer worry too much about rewards... If they compete with anyone for any prize, for any reward -- then they only compete with themselves, their past selves, that is, with their past achievements, to see what more can be accomplished -- to see what more can be learned or experienced next... They truly exemplify Bruce Lee's time honored quote: “If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” -Bruce Lee
DreamScatter 6y ago
Obviously, the viewers of YouTube cannot taste the food being prepared on video, so the content will not be judged by the quality of the food but rather by how engaging the video is to an audience.
xyzzy21 6y ago
Usually truly "talented people" aren't looking to "rise to the top". The startup version of this is the person wanting to get rich but not learn anything needed to become actually successful in anything. Always looking for the shortcut or quick-fix recipe because it's NEVER about talent as a type of success but instead as power and wealth which are only side-effects of talent.

80 points by optimalsolver 6y ago

Life is absurd

I got interested after reading this and retold the story about the chef to my wife, in passing, and she replied with a good point, which basically is: "This is not surprising, the video of a house wife making food is accessible to a higher number of people. A lot fewer people would be able to follow someone who is number one in the world." Might that be the answer at hand? It certainly seems like it applies to programming videos. If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular.

jsty 6y ago
> If we measure by view counts the things that are around the mean in terms of skill will be more popular. I would instinctively have thought material conveying the basics would be the most viewed in the long run - since skill is cumulative, everyone at some point will have had to learn the basics, and only those who succeeded would go on to view intermediate content
- xzel 6y ago
  If you’re looking at an online course I agree the basics will be watched more often (as well as due to people not completing the course). But if you’re looking at something like cooking videos I’d expect the videos of people cooking cool things would get more views. People love food porn and want to watch something exciting about cooking but probably won’t watch a video about knife basics because it’s not as engaging to most people. That’s what I loved so much about Alton Brown and especially Good Eats, he makes so many mundane kitchen things exciting. Compare that to Thomas Keller’s Master Class, which is incredibly informative and I’d recommend it to anyone, but also significantly lower energy and you really have to want to learn the stuff to watch him julienne carrots for 5 minutes.
  - utucuro 6y ago
    Good coincidence. I'm about to subscribe to Master Class (International 2 for 1 offer) and was looking forward to watching Thomas Keller among others. Watched 2 of Massimo Bottura's lectures with a guest pass and found it useful and informative, looks like I'll enjoy Keller as well...
sjg007 6y ago
Seems he does mac and cheese so no? Seems accessible. Maybe people don't know this guy is the best chef in the world, I didn't so I would not have searched him out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEDcWd78U1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEDcWd78U1g
hinkley 6y ago
I would presume that the peak would be closer to 1 std deviation above mean, since improvement usually means looking at things you can’t do but aren’t scared to try. The woodworking videos I watch are often things I can’t do.
- kkoncevicius 6y ago
  I assume a bit of opposite - that the number of potential viewers decrease as the quality and skill necessary to follow the content increases. Basically: people with skill level 1 std above the mean are still able to follow content that is 1 std below the mean. But the opposite is not true.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    The average person will find a video about grilled cheese to be condescending, and won’t enjoy watching it at all. Watching a video about roast lamb or soufflé might inspire me to go to a restaurant instead.
  - 8fGTBjZxBcHq 6y ago
    Having done quite a lot of it professionally once I can say that the details of high level cooking are both mostly understandable to a lay person and incredibly boring to someone who isn't specifically invested in the process of cooking.

cgrealy 6y ago

This is crazy, but hear me out... Is it possible that cooking and making-videos-about-cooking are two entirely different skill sets? The funny thing is I don't disagree with the premise of the article. But I doubt I could think of a worse metric to measure success than YouTube views.

jmcgough 6y ago
Agreed. I checked out the channels he mentioned. Some put out videos that are completely unwatchable. The first video that loads on Massimo Bottura's channel is a portrait-style recording of a livestream shot with a phone and covered in emojis, it's not designed for the format of youtube at all. I would much rather watch someone like Adam Ragusea (https://youtu.be/SDpCzJw2xm4 https://youtu.be/SDpCzJw2xm4), who may not be as good as Bottura, but is much better at cooking than I am and can communicate information well and produces engaging videos.
- jsilence 6y ago
  Exactly this! I much rather like to watch a video of someone who is better than me, but reachable than someone off the charts and beyond my capabilities. Also Adam is really good at making videos. edit: typo
- cgrealy 6y ago
  > but is much better at cooking than I am and can communicate information well This is a really good point. To put it in simple geek numerical terms, if I'm level 20, I need someone who's level 50 to show me how to get to level 30 or 40. Someone who is level 100 would be wasted on me, and I'd probably learn less because it's so far out of my league!
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Besides the entertainment value and communication skills getting to Adam’s level and even beyond is achievable by most people who are willing to put in some time. Getting to Bottura’s level is not. If someone wants to get better at cooking they would gain far more value form watching what is essentially a decent home cook rather than a top chef. The same thing can also be applied to developers most people would gain far more from watching an average developer with good communication skills solving a problem than a top 0.1% talent. Because quite likely the way and speed you think at and your problem solving skills are far closer to them than to someone who designed a programming language or built an entire framework from scratch.

beaner 6y ago

Not really a problem on the face of it. If literally everyone in a company is talented, how can that company have any hierarchy or structure without it being claimed that talented people frequently don't rise to the top within the company? Some talented people must be at the bottom by definition.

inetknght 6y ago
Why must a company have any hierarchy? Why "must" there be a bottom and a top?
- PopsiclePete 6y ago
  So everyone is equally empowered to make decision on the strategic direction of the company? If I got hired tomorrow at Google, I should just be able to decide to kill off Android and Chrome, yeah?
- jsty 6y ago
  Well they don't "have to", but completely non-hierarchical / flat organisations have a habit of either (1) descending into anarchy, or (2) developing hidden hierarchies.
- nnp7000 6y ago
  Because explicit hierarchy is almost always better than implicit hierarchy, which is what happens at a "self-organizing" company. A company may start off with good intentions but without some hierarchy past a certain size or tribal connections (e.g. friends and co-founders), then either: a) Progress slows to a crawl with everyone trying to reach consensus on everything. This also leads to less accountability. b) Everyone doing their own thing leading to an operational mess and constantly repeated work. c) An implicit power structure forming and working behind the scenes which then breeds an atmosphere of paranoia and stress. I'm reminded of these tweets about Valve from Richard Geldreich: https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
- perl4ever 6y ago

nickjj 6y ago

It's interesting the author uses DHH in the example because DHH is not a ghost online. Besides Rails itself, he has almost half a million Twitter followers and even a lot of non-Rails developers know who he is. It really is surprising at how little views his videos get, especially the ones where he spends 20 minutes going over his thought process while going over a feature of Basecamp. This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation in how he applies something to a real world use case. I guess it really boils down to discoverability being mostly about SEO (aka. picking good titles) and how much love you get from the algorithm to push your content in front of folks. But I have a feeling it has a lot more to do with the algorithm at this point due to the sheer number of videos out there. I know I struggle on YouTube (programming / tech topics), even with 11k subs and posting a new video every week consistently, most of the time I'm getting like 400-600 views after the first day and some videos get more views over time depending on how popular the topic is. These are usually videos with 100% or close to 100% upvotes and lots of positive comments. It's super hard to get to the point where you consistently get a lot of views. I've only had a few videos get more than 100k+ views after all this time.

creamytaco 6y ago
"This is like getting a private mentorship from one of the most talented developers of our generation". I weep for the world where this is true. DHH found a niche and through copious application of the "worse is better" approach, became famous. That in itself makes him neither interesting nor particularly talented. The real tragedy is hundreds of genius engineers posting eye-opening material in their personal blogs, that I have little time to fully follow much less digest, being invisible to the masses.
- nickjj 6y ago
  > I weep for the world where this is true It's too late to edit my comment but I should have been more specific and included the word "web" in there instead of having it applied to all developers. I've watched all of DHH's YouTube videos and ignoring his opinionated views on things I think it would be hard to say he's not a good developer. His thought process is very clear and the code he writes (at least in the videos I've seen) seems good, especially since it's in an older code base that's really running in production at scale and not a little toy example to make it look good on video. In my mind, a talented developer is more than someone who can think of and implement great algorithms. It's pulling together many things (coding chops, ability to communicate, API design, thoughtfulness of the code quality, being able to turn the code into something nice for either developers or app features depending on who the audience is, etc.) and IMO DHH hits all of these marks, so it's surprising to me at how little views his videos gets. I wonder if that's why he stopped making them.

booleandilemma 6y ago

There’s being talented and then there’s optimizing for being seen. People of the former don’t necessarily do the latter. Famous people usually have a strong desire to be famous.

georgebonnr 6y ago

Maybe one of the lessons we're learning from removing all the gatekeepers is that Michelin stars aren't a truly objective form of assigning value. Or, value doesn't exist in a vacuum -- it depends on the application, and maybe the applications aren't what gatekeepers say they are.

deleted 6y ago

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tibiahurried 6y ago

Very true. What makes an individual rise to the top is networking and politics. Skills don't really matter.

jandrese 6y ago

Being talented at your job doesn't necessarily mean you are talented in climbing the corporate ladder or rising to the top of a media landscape. They are two different skills.

moksly 6y ago

Being talented at something doesn’t mean you’re talented at marketing and selling it. The headline is interesting but the article can easily be summed up as: “McDonalds isn’t the highest quality restaurant, but it’s very popular, and, I have nothing to add to that beyond pointing it out.”.

bawolff 6y ago
Or at teaching it.
- moksly 6y ago
  Or that. And beyond that, different people learn different ways. If your target is to teach programming 101, you’re probably going to have more views than someone teaching people how to do banking related cobol.

fvdessen 6y ago

Or maybe being the best Cook in the world is a very different skill than making good youtube videos. I tried to watch some of Massimo Bottura's videos, and they don't compare well to what you would find in a top youtube channel in terms of presentation & storytelling. I mean he's just posting badly compressed screen captures of vertically recorded tik tok videos ...

j_walter 6y ago

Talent of a specific activity isn't enough. When did we define "rising to the top" as getting the most YouTube views? I have seen great restaurants (food wise) fail because they didn't have a good location or the right advertising. I've seen engineers fail because they couldn't articulate their ideas in a way that made people realize their value. It's not always about your talent, but how to make others realize you are talented.

meowsinin 6y ago

Who’s to say the ‘random housewives’ are not comparable cooks in their niches than the ‘top chef’? There are major cultural barriers to joining commercial kitchens, so there’s likely a large contingent of incredibly talented cooks that don’t work in restaurants. And also, as another commenter points out, perhaps the ‘random housewives’ have more accessible content.

meowsinin 6y ago
By cultural barriers I mean culture of heavy drug and alcohol use, plus yelling, etc. isn’t acceptable to everyone.

klyrs 6y ago

Weird. A lot of this is focused on youtube stats, and conflates "success getting youtube views" with "skill as a chef." Their #1 chef in the world, with all his accolades, is indubitably "at the top." Michelin, San Pellegrino, etc., all agree. He's risen to the top of the chef world, end of story. But what about the youtube world? Is he a talented youtuber, or is he merely a mediocre youtuber? Well, I kinda hate the format, so I won't try to judge that myself. But he's being compared to talented youtubers who are less-acclaimed as chefs. From what I gather, youtube is popular among people who want to learn how to do something. I know what it takes to make a fancy meal, and I know what it takes to get food on the table after a long day's work, in time to get it down my kid's gullet before bathtime rolls around. These goals are not compatible. If I wanted somebody to tell me how to make dinner, I'd watch the unacclaimed housewife. Later on in the article, the author bemoans the difficulty that good chefs have rising to the top of their world. And, yeah, marketing certainly plays a role in that. But so does the extremely low-margin, high-competition nature of restauranting.

Spinnaker_ 6y ago

I watched some of the Michelin star chef videos. They are pretty terrible. Camera is shaky, audio is all over the place, random people come in frame and start conversations, instructions are not at all clear, etc. They seem to have an appropriate amount of views.

Nextgrid 6y ago
The difference is that the YouTuber's job is to make good videos, while the Michelin-starred chefs job is cooking and they couldn't care less about actually making a good video?

dannykwells 6y ago

"Again, I don’t really have any insightful takeaways here. I’ve just been noticing myself slowly realizing that the best don’t always rise to the top, and these are the examples that have been sticking out to me." The lack of insight is key here, because really this isn't a hard problem at the surface. You need a compelling story, or product, that resonates with people. The more people it resonates with, the larger your audience. Also, it never occurred to the author that DHH or Massimo don't *want" a big audience. They might want to explain their work to true fans and die hards, and not have to make it broadly accessible to the point where it could get 1M+ views. It's not about talent. It could be a choice.

DeusExMachina 6y ago

> So… arguably the best chef in the entire world. On YouTube. Showing you how he cooks. How he thinks. > Yet his videos only get 10-20k views. That might sound like a lot on the surface, but pay attention to view counts on YouTube and you’ll find random housewives consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views for their cooking videos. Most people don't want to cook at chef level. They want to learn easy recipes to cook home, often with little time investment. Even now that I know this guy exists, I have no interest in watching his videos. But be sure that when I am looking for an answer to an easy cooking question, I'll be finding one of those "random housewives". > My core point is that there are people like DHH, like Massimo, who should be getting way more views on their videos, given the quality of the content they’re producing and what they’ve done to promote that content. Do you disagree with that? Yes. The Massimo Bottura has a total of 13 videos from months ago, with random titles that mean nothing like "Let's burn the house down". DHH has 12 videos published years ago, and they are not even all about software. Why should I watch those? Because he is famous? Most of Bottura's videos are live, produced with a hand held phone and no preparation. I'm not disputing his knowledge, but is presentation is dismal. Where is the quality of the content? Where is the effort in promoting? I see very little of both. It's also quite ironic that the two people he takes as examples raised at the top of their respective professions, invalidating his point. They are just not the best teachers/presenters, which is not their core skill, and that's why they are not at the top of that hierarchy. Being good at something does not automatically grant you the right to be revered in every other field.

disabled 6y ago

Yeah, the algorithms are meant to keep you online more, and are not there to give you good content, as in entertainment, let alone things that you need to know. It is ironic, given how much data is hoarded about us. In the article meritocracy is mentioned. Meritocracy is a joke in America. People at the top basically have it rigged for their kids, even worse than what aristocracy brought (which offered a leisurely life). The Meritocracy Myth by Yale Law Professor Stephen McNamee is a good read regarding this. It is shocking, as in the statistics.

_0qft 6y ago

People said I was talented, and I always loved math and physics. I went to prep school for math and physics, and my emotional state did not allow me to pass the class. In the modern world, we value merit and motivation over everything else, we don't care about aspirations or self-determination. There will always be a barrier or a filter to stop people from doing what they really want to do. We want people to work hard to prove they want something, and we don't really value what people like, we only value competitiveness. Problem is, we don't understand a lot about motivations, and merit is a myth. People will always fall back to classical argument of natural selection and survival of the fittest to explain how the world is unfair. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy In the end, "raising to the top" or asserting one's position in the world, and not feeling like a loser, those things don't matter. There are plenty of people who find their place in the world, but who will still feel like they're missing something once they reach it.

deleted 6y ago

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andyxor 6y ago

So true

uncomputation 6y ago

In the style of “DH6” the author linked, I don’t agree with the unwritten assumption he seems to make: that the quality of a video is as simple as the qualifications of the person making it. Nor is it even the “density” of information provided. The overall quality of a YouTube video also involves: accessibility, SEO, inviting/entertaining narration or personality, and even some technical meta-quality stuff like the quality of the camera, audio, etc. All of this factors into the overall experience of the viewer and the skill of content creation is oftentimes very different from the skill of, for example, cooking, or coding. Not all masters are teachers.

anm89 6y ago

"Don't rise to the top" "Doesn't get a lot of youtube views" "Has three michelin stars" I think we can stop reading now.

yoav 6y ago

blogger discovers most people don’t have the same preferences that they do. Is shocked and confused by this. Writes a post about it. Why is this on the front page?

suifbwish 6y ago

This is because it takes a lot more than talent to rise to the top. Rising to the top is 99% hard work and 1% talent (being just knowing where to strategically focus the efforts

mempko 6y ago
No, it's because it takes more luck, talent isn't enough. Imaging you have a normal distribution on talent, and a uniform distribution on luck. Lets say the ranking process incorporates 95% talent and 5% luck. So you have a final score of 0.95talent+ 0.05luck. In a field with millions of people, to be at the top 100, you not only have to have a lot of talent, but you also have to have a lot of luck. It's not enough to just have talent. Because if you have the top talent but no luck, in a million people you would be ranked at 50,000 because 95% of the selection process considers merit, the other 5% is luck. To be in the top 100, you would need to be very talented and be in the top 1% of lucky people. With different talent/luck ratios the numbers obviously change, but even in a system where you are 95% merit based, luck still plays a HUGE role to be at the very top. It's math. And keep in mind there are billions of people in this world. Programming alone has millions of people.
- suifbwish 6y ago
  I agree but disagree. A tendency towards strategically placed hard work is a talent of its own and to have that tendency is a form of luck, although there are those who believe they are self made and others are lazy. There really isn’t anything we are capable of doing that can’t be broken down into luck and innate ways of interacting with that luck.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

Its absolutely true that the best doesn't always rise to the top, but not for the reasons cited in this article. The best chef isn't necessarily the best Youtube video maker, or even the best (or most entertaining) instructional cook. However, it is true that even if you were the best Youtube video maker and the best, most entertaining chef in the world, there's no guarantee you'd be at the top (or even ahead of whatever cooking video Youtube's algorithm is suggesting to the masses).

fuzzfactor 6y ago
>So… arguably the best chef in the entire world. On YouTube. Showing you how he cooks. How he thinks. >Yet his videos only get 10-20k views. That might sound like a lot on the surface, but pay attention to view counts on YouTube and you’ll find random housewives consistently getting hundreds of thousands of views for their cooking videos. >I think you have to consider that some sort of failure. An expected failure by the vast majority of youtube watchers to seek this kind of excellence.

Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago

There's a short story by Chekhov "The First-class Passenger" that depicts a similar sentiment from the year 1886 :)

smitty1e 6y ago

Figured out some years ago that: Doing the work is half the challenge; marketing the work is the other half.

dsq 6y ago

I would go so far as to say that for talent to succeed in spite of vested interest, there has to be a situation of real perceived crisis and breakdown in order to overcome inertia and cut through the clouds of b-s that usually envelope everything. Otherwise there just isn't enough impetus to ditch 'safe' mediocrity.

kbos87 6y ago

What interests me about the question being posed here is how we humans are so attracted to binaries and superlatives. "Best", "most talented", even the concept of "success" are all mental shortcuts that the world is so attached to but are less and less effective in the world we live in. Who is to say what those things even mean in a time when there is nearly infinite choice, whether you are watching cooking videos, product reviews, or anything else? The author points out that there are "random housewives" with 100x the reach of Michelin star rated chefs. This strikes me as a great example of the fact that the people and content who rise to the top today get there through a complicated dance of specific talents (some cooking talent, probably great screen presence) and choosing a broad addressable market. You could almost argue that this is more meritocratic than the world we used to live in where a select few had the ability to tell the rest of us what the "best" was.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>The best frequently don’t rise to the top True, but in life, there are people who do things because they have to do things, and then there are people who do things because they want to do things... Highly spiritually advanced people (and I don't claim to be one of them -- far from!) -- no longer do things for a reward -- that's because to them, the act of doing and the reward for the doing -- are one in the same... That is, because they live life at such a high level of self-expression -- they have unified action and reward. For them, there is no time delay between the action and the reward... To use a analogy borrowed from psychology, think of this as having attained "Self-Actualization" in Maslow's "hierarchy of needs"... People at that level -- no longer worry too much about rewards... If they compete with anyone for any prize, for any reward -- then they only compete with themselves, their past selves, that is, with their past achievements, to see what more can be accomplished -- to see what more can be learned or experienced next... They truly exemplify Bruce Lee's time honored quote: “If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” -Bruce Lee

DreamScatter 6y ago

Obviously, the viewers of YouTube cannot taste the food being prepared on video, so the content will not be judged by the quality of the food but rather by how engaging the video is to an audience.

xyzzy21 6y ago

Usually truly "talented people" aren't looking to "rise to the top". The startup version of this is the person wanting to get rich but not learn anything needed to become actually successful in anything. Always looking for the shortcut or quick-fix recipe because it's NEVER about talent as a type of success but instead as power and wealth which are only side-effects of talent.