31 ms·

Individuals Matter

• rStar 5y ago
  if your org doesn’t work for you in some fundamental way, find a way out, immediately. you can’t change the board, and the board gives hr it’s marching orders, so if you have management you consider to be terrible and a “clueless” hr team, you have to leave. orgs can evolve over time, but they don’t change for you or your feelings, no matter how smart you are or how justified your feelings.
• aVx1uyD5pYWW 5y ago
  Glad to see Dan Luu endorsing the idea of a 10x programmer
• evancoop 5y ago
  An overlooked notion, analogous to fat-tail, high-upside ROI is the absence of a similar downside risk. In the case of the sclerotic, flagging, midsize company failing to adapt, we're actually talking about a fixed downside (the company can fail) and a virtually unlimited upside. In this case, allowing talented humans to explore seems mathematically-required. And yet...
• Veelox 5y ago
  Just as a random aside, I don't know why but Dan is putting out some great articles at an absurd rate late. I really appreciate it. Keep it up Dan!
• Tycho 5y ago
  I suppose the opposite of all this is Guns’n’Roses taking ten years to record Chinese Democracy because Axl Rose wanted to hire a pro skateboarder to do mixing and stuff like that.
• ozim 5y ago
  One thing missing is that author is assuming that talented people will like to work in one place indefinitely. With developers skipping boat every ~2 years on average how do you make sure you will keep such person in-house. You can compensate people only up to some level but as they got bored or feel they can do something better with their time they will move. Not to mention family reasons or whatever else can happen in persons life. You can have talented dev today - next day he might be hit by a truck, if you run your business by relying on people you will be affected by such accidents, if you run your business as if everyone is interchangeable you won't. Even if they are not easily replaceable. That "corporations are doing it wrong" premise is also wrong - somehow those big corporations are chugging along for decades. Of course they leave "lucky ticket" profits on the table, but that "lucky ticket" has risk of loss - which is missing from the text. Yes with small focused team you can achieve great ROI in one off project but those are not projects that are done by big corporations. Then you have all the startups that usually fail. Then leave alone "my friend's team was composed of people who had a track record of being highly effective across a variety of contexts" - seems like author does not understand how hard it is to find such people and assemble a team especially if you are BigCorp. That friend just got lucky to be in specific time and place and their experience. Especially if you read that they just wanted to hire another scapegoat - so it is just survivor-ship bias.
  • Jensson 5y ago
    > That "corporations are doing it wrong" premise is also wrong - somehow those big corporations are chugging along for decades. Once you have market dominance it is really hard to lose it, you have more resources and more experience than any startup. So they can carry a lot of bad practices without failing as a company, they have to be really bad to lose their position. This is actually a common business question, how can big well funded companies ever fall? Well, things like this is how they fall. Any one of these things wont be enough, but it all ads up.
    • ozim 5y ago
      There is a lot of corporations that are far from market dominance. There is more to the world than Fortune 100. Some companies chug along with ~500 employees for multiple years with a lot of rotation.
  • rramadass 5y ago
    > if you run your business by relying on people you will be affected by such accidents, if you run your business as if everyone is interchangeable you won't. Even if they are not easily replaceable. This right here is the problem and a fundamental error. It is a recipe for guaranteed disaster because you have completely ignored all the knowledge, experience and expertise which one has gathered over a period of time. Unless and until the task is trivial and/or very well defined with all constraints, assumptions and risks clarified people are not interchangeable. Paraphrasing Isaac Asimov: [Knowledge Work] does not mean my Ignorance is just as good as your Knowledge.
  • underdeserver 5y ago
    In my view skipping boat every ~2 years on average is the result of a bad situation. Maybe people feel they have to do that to increase their comp or advance in their career, but I'd much rather stay in one place for 5-10 years growing it and growing with it. I'd also wager that a good workplace that provides autonomy, fair compensation, strong peers and a good atmosphere will not see 2-year average attrition.
  • pm90 5y ago
• Andy_G11 5y ago
  This is not a planning problem - this is a power problem. If competent and incompetent people alike are told to regard each other as peers in a meritocracy, a range of possible outcomes ensues. The only option for incompetent staff will be to game the system by ensuring that they pass a load off their shoulders to competent staff and cultivate cultural and organisational aspects that let them give the impression of performance without actually having to perform. This article is quite anecdotal but it is possible for organisations to require high performance from members. E.g. I assume that there is less scope for less competent individuals to hide out in teams like SWAT teams, heart or brain surgery teams, bands or movie crews: every one is visible and under the spotlight for delivery at any one time and relied upon by others to be at the top of their game. Critical dependence should trim incompetence from organisations, but will only work if scrupulously applied. Perhaps logically, this might work best in fluid structures where selection and deselection of team mates / suppliers is very easy.
  • Andy_G11 5y ago
    Relentless, critical implementation of individual performance testing (e.g. football teams) might help shift organisational sclerosis. How can this be done for white collar roles? Maybe like Amazon? - See this article : https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/ https://chrislaing.net/blog/the-memo/ (just a suggestion)
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  For large corporations I think it inevitably people with a C title regard troopers in the trench as mere numbers, just as a general does. He has to because his mindset doesn't allow otherwise. For such a large entity to survive, the leader has to have a "collective" mindset. My recommendation is to move to smaller companies/organizations so that individuals may be treated more independently (regardless of whether their job matters or not).
• bob229 5y ago
  Is this moronically awful website meant to be funny? Maybe this guy has something good to say but I’ll never know as the site is unreadable
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I tend to enjoy the topics that Dan Luu discusses, but his "wall o' text" presentation can be somewhat intimidating. It's better on a computer, than on an iPad. He's absolutely correct. I'm not sure that anyone in the industry (that can do something about it) cares, though. Nothing will change, until C-suite pocketbooks start getting impacted. As long as people are willing to pay for the type of software generated by organizations that treat ICs as "LEGO blocks," then it will continue. For myself, I care -deeply- about the Quality of my work. I. Simply. Cannot. Bring. Myself. To. Write. Crap. Since no one is interested in paying me to do it, I write for free. I'm very fortunate that I am able to do this.
  • zshrdlu 5y ago
    What do you consider to be crap?
    • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
      I won't actually get into that. The reason being, is that I have made it a point to try to keep my [public] criticism to my own work. I tend to hold myself to a fairly high bar. I'm quite aware that the level of Quality that I expect from myself is usually considered "commercially infeasible." I'm OK with that. It's never been about the money, for me. You are more than welcome to look at my [highly accessible] public portfolio, to see what kind of work I do. Check out my HN profile. I am not anonymous.
• gadrev 5y ago
  > The roadmap creation and review process maintains the polite fiction that people are interchangeable, but everyone knows this isn't true and teams that are effective and want to ship on time can't play along when the rubber hits the road even if they play along with the managers, directors, and VPs, who create roadmaps as if people can be generically abstracted over. Agreed, and this breaks down when there's a large deviation from the mean for any particular team member, where the mean isn't necessarily some sort of "average", but more like what the rest of the organization has become used to in terms of productivity from that team/department. But if the "polite fiction" enforcement resists this reality, it comes out in all sort of undesirable ways. It's... not nice.
  • a_square_peg 5y ago
    We are interchangeable - everyone is. The president of the United States is interchangeable. The CEO is interchangeable. Is this really that difficult to accept?
• Gentil 5y ago
  Interestingly enough, the pay for these individuals differ too. And this matters as well. We should be taught to negotiate. This is the most underrated thing our industry and seniors don't tell juniors of the field. I learned this the hard way. After 5 years when the company was winding down, I learnt 5 colleagues of varied gender and race who were my colleagues were paid shit ton more than me. I know this is a sensitive topic. But if you ask, they will pay more or you will know how much you are worth. I thought the system will acknowledge and reward accordingly after I got a surprising bonus. IT DOES NOT. You have to fight for it. I felt really betrayed. And this is when everyone told me how and when to negotiate. From the moment you are hired, you bargain for a better pay. That itself, from that starting period itself, your pay differs compared to the other person who may have been hired with you. Then not everyone takes the same effort (they can't or don't want to for varied reasons). But some people do a 9 to 5, the other people does late nights, some people are dettached from company and it's vision, some are are very loyal. It depends on individuals and their circumstances. Handling everyone the same way doesn't work. This discourages people who want to put in more effort. So they jump ship and move to another company for a better pay. No person want the same amount of pay, they all want more. And the answer is negotiate. And ditch and make some noise on companies which have stereotype pay. Trust me. It is not the right place for you to work. Imagine this, giving $1 million dollar to ten people and see how much money they all have after a year. It will all be very different for each of them. It will not be the same amount. That is the same for salaries, you salary at this point are based on how much you worked and how much you bargained. It won't be the same for another person with same experience and same background. It just won't be.
• 1penny42cents 5y ago
  OP touches upon a critical point of human reasoning: we have a bias towards simplicity. We favor the legible (as the article calls it), the tractable, the countable, the fungible. At certain levels of complexity, seeing reality as it is is just impossible. This complexity can be in terms of the subject itself, or the organizational/communication overhead required to tackle that subject. This bias towards simplicity is more often optimal than not. As he noted, the variance in performance becomes unbearably huge as you try to get more precise. The thing is that it's easy to pick out where simple models are wrong. The more complex the subject, the more edge cases there are, the fatter the tails are, etc. But it's harder to replace those models with new ones that increase precision while retaining sufficient efficiency. So just as simple models account for the cost of an employee without accounting for their value; he critiques those models for their precision without accounting for their efficiency. It's not as easy to predict/calculate value as it is to calculate cost. So while he's right in saying "these models are wrong", people won't be persuaded until they hear "these models are better". And "figure out the optimal solution in every individual context" is not a better model, not given the complexity of our work and the limited resources we have. Anyone taking the message here as "managers are idiots", are also oversimplifying things. They feel the moral high ground of being right, and it can be helpful to highlight where our models are wrong. But we also need to replace them with better ones, which is much harder than critiquing the best usable-but-imprecise ones we have.
• mr_tristan 5y ago
  I’ve experienced a corollary to this: individuals don’t instantaneously gel into teams. I’ve found places that try to solve hard problems by “finding good folks and putting them together on a ‘squad’”. Or, deciding to reorganize and just breaking up teams and mashing them up in weird ways. What I have seen work: swapping managers. Leaving the team intact but bringing a new manager in can actually change execution a lot. But this is just not how a lot of businesses like to think.
• softwaredoug 5y ago
  Another way of saying this is "Don't use process to overcome people problems". I've seen a lot of dysfunction because the org chooses to put a heavy process in place because 1 or 2 people made obviously bad decisions. It then punishes everyone for the acts of a few, and usually is done because the org isn't healthy enough to give those people feedback or let them go.
• mynegation 5y ago
  Individuals do matter but outside of their immediate manager no one has knowledge, time, or attention span to account for it. It is a case of "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" and this is why sufficiently high level plans and budget allocations follow the assumption of fungibility.
• hamburga 5y ago
  This conversation makes me wonder: has there been any halfway decent quantitative research on estimation methods? I've lived through what seems like the de facto agile standard: you take some piece of work, and estimate it out according to a point scale, assuming the "average" dev does the work. Curious to know now if it has any effect on project timeliness. Or are these estimates generally "vanity metrics" in practice? Anecdotally, they are generally pretty useless for planning unless they are at a very fine grained level, with low complexity, on an extremely well-understood piece of software.
• moistrobot 5y ago
  maybe i'm alone here, but the lack of formatting made this difficult to read
• eclat 5y ago
  You might enjoy reading Hayek.
• bumbledraven 5y ago
  “… when ROI is a heavy-tailed distribution … then severely tamping down on the right side of the curve to improve legibility is very costly and can cost you the majority of your potential returns.”
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• na85 5y ago
  Did we ever figure out why he wants the computer that comes in the smallest box?
  • kragen 5y ago
    Did you try asking?
  • jodrellblank 5y ago
    Can you not just imagine? Luu: "I want the computer with the smallest box" Sales rep: "Boxes are nothing to do with computer performance" Luu: "I understand. Still, please humour me?" Rep: "But there are sneering people on HN who think you think you're better than them. Somehow this should be important to you" Luu: "Anyway, moving on, I want to buy a computer" Rep: "No. Not until you explain." Luu: "Fine, I want to ship it to my mom in Alaska and want to minimise shipping cost." Rep: "Ah! Gotcha! Apple will ship it for you, to anywhere" Luu: "I don't want to use your shipping, I need to customise it first" Rep: "Ah! Gotcha! iCloud sync will transfer her data when she signs in" Luu: "I can't use that, I want to install custom new things" Rep: "Smallness often comes at a cost premium. You might find that a bigger computer has a little extra shipping, but overall comes out cheaper" Luu: "I'm paying for the computer, but my mom is paying for the shipping. It's more important for me to minimise shipping cost than computer cost" Rep: "If you're going to pay part of a more expensive computer cost, why can't you pay part of a more expensive shipping cost?" Luu: "When my mom sees the shipping price on the parcel, she will send me that amount of money, she can't afford it, and I don't want to argue with her about it." Rep: "She can't afford shipping but you're not paying for it? You're not paying for food or rent?" Luu: "What I am and am not paying my mom for is irrelevant. She doesn't want to live off me, but will accept a gift, but also wants to pay her way when she can, and I want to respect her wishes. This is the agreement we came to." Rep: "You don't want to have a small discussion with your mom to save money? She won't change the agreement to save you money?" Luu: "I won't let her change the agreement to save me money, if it makes her feel like she didn't contribute and then she feels bad using the gift" Rep: "Luu, I..." Luu: "This could go on literally forever. The people on HN are internet people who thrive on cynicism. There is no resolution to this which will satisfy them, nor is that a goal I am trying to meet. This is not what I came here to discuss. Will you please help me find the computer with the smallest box in exchange for money, for reasons which I am perfectly happy to agree are irrelevant and irrational, but nevertheless am sticking with?"
• jnwatson 5y ago
  Deciding that your attrition is too low is like determining your days between accidents is too low.
  • hinkley 5y ago
    I think attrition can be low as long as your team is steadily growing. No attrition can lead to no new people, and no new people is often the bigger problem. A stable team becomes an echo chamber and/or rant fest. Certain arguments have already been won, right or wrong, and others can never be won. New people come in and ask dumb questions that upset the status quo. They often are the only people who can.
• AussieWog93 5y ago
  This is a really interesting and enlightening article that covers an important topic, and it's honestly sad that it will get less engagement than some clickbait or hot-topic issue.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• hammock 5y ago
  Would like to see these thoughts applied to public health policy.
  • brodouevencode 5y ago
    ...or all public policy.
    • maccolgan 5y ago
      I think it's something inherent in the self-selection for the politician/bureaucrat process that makes them inherently unable to believe that people aren't cogs.
  • nimish 5y ago
    >Some people seem to view companies like a game of SimCity, where if you want more money, you can turn a knob, increase taxes, and get more money, uniformly impacting the city. But companies are not a game of SimCity. If you want more attrition and turn a knob that cranks that up, you don't get additional attrition that's sampled uniformly at random. People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the actions company leadership takes impacts everyone in the same way. The people who are most effective will be disproportionately likely to leave if you turn a knob that leads to increased attrition. This gem applies to so many fields. It's bonkers that this has to be spelled out to people who are ostensibly experts. This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model.
    • pedrosorio 5y ago
      > The people who are most effective will be disproportionately likely to leave if you turn a knob that leads to increased attrition. > This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model. The description above is just a different model
    • chrisweekly 5y ago
      > "This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model." Yet that is precisely what classical economic theory has done, for decades! It boggles my mind how long it's taking for that kind of reductionist, simplistic, reality-ignoring "thinking" to mature.
• hprotagonist 5y ago
  Granny: “There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that—” Granny: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they mean they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” Mightily Oats: “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—” Granny: “But they start with thinking about people as things.”
  • voz_ 5y ago
    Pratchett is amazing, one can identify his prose from a mile away. RIP to a beautiful soul.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• paxys 5y ago
  "Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.
  • jseban 5y ago
    The best teams I've ever worked with, that were the most productive and also had the best team work and team spirit, was when we assigned tasks in planning. And gave the tasks to whoever was most suitable to work on it. Unfortunately we were never allowed to do that, because of Scrum, and were only able to do it on the low down for a short time until management cracked down on it and enforced "anyone who happens to be free works on whatever is on top of the backlog".
    • autarch 5y ago
      I "enforced" this as a manager at my last position. But I quoted the word "enforced" because this wasn't something I had to argue with anyone. I understood that it meant things might take a little longer, but it also meant that everyone on the team (which was small) would get exposed to all of the code we worked on. Specialization means speed, but it also means a lower bus factor.
    • Viliam1234 5y ago
      > Unfortunately we were never allowed to do that, because of Scrum, and were only able to do it on the low down for a short time until management cracked down on it and enforced "anyone who happens to be free works on whatever is on top of the backlog". Ironically, this (what the management did) is completely against the rules of Scrum... in theory. But it is what management typically does when they are doing "Scrum".
  • badtension 5y ago
    In my experience it still makes sense to estimate together using the same story points (or T-shirts) when there are people ranging from almost no experience to very senior ones working on a project. 1 SP for a senior may take 1h of his time and for a junior that would be 2-3 days but it's still 1 SP - a relatively simple task. This is in contrast to a fallacy of recalculating SPs to time-based units cause if we do that we might as well just estimate in hours/days. It's about agreeing on some baseline first (what does 1, 2, 5 SP task look like?) and going on from that. We just need to remember that velocity will be different for different people so team capacity calculation is going to be all over the place but I think this approach can be useful.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• kasey_junk 5y ago
  One thing that I always think is undervalued is how variable a single persons output is. A bad day, illness, life changes, etc all dramatically impact a person’s efficiency. Treating even the same persons output as abstract is fraught with issues. One month a rockstar the next a schlub.
  • foxfluff 5y ago
    Motivation is a big one for me. Some tasks (or projects) just don't motivate me at all, and they turn into a dreadful slog. Others are captivating and I have a hard time logging out at the end of the day. I think there's easily a more than 10x difference in my own performance between those. Could be closer to 100x.
  • mrandish 5y ago
    Some of the most capable people I've ever worked with have been "bursty" in that they would go through intense periods of high value output and then need to almost go dormant for a while to reset. As long as the "high value" phase was uniquely and significantly valuable it wasn't a problem so long as management understood and planned their assignments appropriately.
    • BatteryMountain 5y ago
      I'm like this. Not just in a commercial context, but also at home with pet projects. I go through phases of being extremely creative with things I come up with, for about 2 or 3 days, then I go back to normal for about 30 to 60 days before I get to that state again. Luckily I've been able to notice this behavioural quirk so I try to code/write as much as possible down to use as building block to use on my "boring" days, but sometimes it feels like I cannot remember doing it or it was a different person doing it, kinda baffling to be honest. During the bursty periods, it affects both my creativity and the amount of work I output. I haven't found a way to trigger/force myself into this state yet. I've tried different sleeping patterns, food, sex, drugs & caffeine, different kinds of music etc, to no effect. Music has come the closest to getting me to that feeling/state. Anyone else have more things to try?
• babelfish 5y ago
  It's really hard for me to take this author seriously after his "Willingness to look stupid" post that went viral here about a month ago. The entire post was ridden with a superiority complex about how he's willing to look stupid, but never willing to explain his actions that make him look stupid. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28946490
  • csee 5y ago
    Merely publishing public essays is an example of being willing to look stupid.
  • eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Lacking emotional intelligence to explain my motivations is something I’ve struggled and worked to improve my whole life. But it doesn’t make my motivations invalid. Just harder for you to understand.
  • civilized 5y ago
    Maybe his reason for wanting a small box computer was idiosyncratic and weird and he preferred not to discuss it. Maybe it was part of a bizarre prank or a secret project. The dictum "think horses not zebras" has its value - ordinary possibilities are more likely - but it doesn't say that zebras don't exist. To be honest, this comment is a perfect illustration of why Dan had to write that essay. Some people can't see beyond the obvious, and if the obvious is "this guy is stupid", well, you better not be afraid to look stupid.
    • babelfish 5y ago
      It is far more important to be able to explain your line of reasoning to those around you, especially professionally (much of the essay was about school/work), than it is to hope your coworkers are able to "see beyond the obvious".
      • civilized 5y ago
        Or maybe it's far more important to be okay with looking stupid than to assume that lack of understanding from others always means something negative about your communication abilities or choices. If someone can't imagine any other reason someone would look stupid in the eyes of others than because they explained something poorly, I wonder how much experience of life have they had?
• tayo42 5y ago
  Abstraction is necessary to deal with things at scale, on a programming focused site i think we all know that and know that often the trade off is inefficiency. Its probably to expensive to track all these peoples real value and really it doesn't even matter. What was the consequence of all these supposedly valuable people leaving? Did the stock drop after the guy saving millions a year left? Probably some pointless project was delayed that would have been delayed anyway. We are nothing but cogs in a machine that doesn't care about the cogs. I think you'll just drive your self crazy worrying about corporate waste and monetary inefficiency (environmental might be the only thing worth thinking about). There always going to be waste and there's no awards when its fixed. I used to be concerned about money being wasted, but now, IDK why I cared in the first place. Its not my money and I don't get any of it.
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    This depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're at some adtech company where the entire point of the advertising is to cancel out some competitor's advertising and you're only there for the paycheck, efficiency is irrelevant because the company could be destroyed by a giant meteor and nobody else in the entire would would have any reason to care. But not all jobs are like that. Some people make medical devices that save lives. If the company is inefficient, they don't save as many lives, and that matters. Some people are in charge of making loans to people or selling legally mandated insurance and the rate the customers pay has a significant effect on their economic well-being. Some jobs are in the production of food and the work impacts the quality and price of food. Some companies make fire suppression systems or automobiles or industrial equipment, and it needs to be safe without being unaffordable. Not all jobs are an exercise in futility.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > Abstraction is necessary to deal with things at scale, on a programming focused site i think we all know that and know that often the trade off is inefficiency. We also all know that abstractions leak, and sometimes... Not always! But sometimes, those leaks will kill you. CPU details are irrelevant, until per-opcode details give you a 10x speedup. Compilers are a magic black box, until a compiler bug breaks your code. Hardware is cheap, until someone notices a way to save millions by caring. And yes, sometimes developers are interchangeable, until they make or break the company.
• csee 5y ago
  Realizing this is important for retention. It's damaging when upper management falsely thinks people are interchangeble, which is a common view among non-technical types and HR. This leads to 10x people feeling underappreciated and resentful, ultimately causing them to resign for higher compensation and more appreciation elsewhere. It can literally destroy small companies if an individual's unique contribution isn't properly understood and valued. Managers should err away from language about "the group", "the team" or "collective" and really drill down to the level of individuals as much as is practical. This is the correct resolution for most decision making. "The team" is just an abstraction that's useful to a small extent for a certain class of decision making, but not beyond that.
  • 908B64B197 5y ago
    > It can literally destroy small companies if an individual's unique contribution isn't properly understood and valued. It's generally cheaper to poach engineers than to buy a company. Just food for thoughts.
    • throwawaygh 5y ago
      Is this really true for small companies? A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. It's hard to find numbers for the value of small software businesses (OP's quote), but this article [1] puts the number at $667k. If that's true, the engineer is SUBSTANTIALLY more expensive than the business (you're not just renting the business for a year). [1] In the period between 2013 and 2016, the average sale was $667,000. While some sales were obviously much higher, and some were actually a bit lower, this must be an encouraging figure for a business owner to see.
      • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        > A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. Those discounts are why it's easier to poach the employees. If a company has 10 engineers earning $200K/year, why would you buy the company for $667K per person and then pay the employees on top of that? Just offer the employees $500K/year and they'll stream right over.
• zem 5y ago
  the last paragraph made me realise, i indirectly owe my current, amazing job to that. i was on a team at work which was fine, i wasn't hyped about it or anything but my boss was good and i had found an interesting subarea of the product to work on. then i got taken off it and moved to another product that absolutely did not motivate me in any way. stuck it out for a couple of quarters, finally talked to my boss about being put back on the old product. he talked to his boss, who said no way, we need people working on the new product. that finally gave me the kick in the pants to apply to change teams to work on something i was really enthusiastic about, and i've been here ever since.
• cushychicken 5y ago
  the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.
  • csee 5y ago
    Depends how good your hiring is. At the places I've worked, I'd want to see 0.1 (involuntary) attrition at least, given that mishires happened 1 in 10 to 1 in 5 times. A low attrition rate in the context of lots of mishires means we're not firing people quickly enough.
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      While I agree that one shouldn't keep mishires around I wonder how you established that the rate of mishires is 10-20%. Seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You don't know the actual rate if managers aren't firing the mishires. If you pressure managers into randomly firing 10-20% of their people you can't calculate the rate. In fact 50% of one team might be mishires while another is 100% made up of great engineers.
      • csee 5y ago
        I knew the rate because I was on the ground working with the underperformers. But as to how to translate this into HR policy in a large org, I have no idea.
        • tharkun__ 5y ago
          I would venture that you really can't if you want to be accurate and fair. You were on the ground, which to me implies that you had a local view of the rate. In your area the observed rate of mishires apparently was around 10-20%. If you were in another team/part of the org you might have thought 50% or 0%. My guess is that HR does exactly this sort of thing. Someone did a study once and averaged numbers that were obtained 'somehow' and that is then simply applied. Like stack ranking. Everything is a normal distribution, right? If you ask me: What large orgs are not good at is doing what actually makes sense. It's too much work and there is so much that could go wrong anyway. The way out are blanket policies implemented by drones, bean counters, the odd psychopath etc.
• djsavvy 5y ago
  > But many effective interventions cannot have their impact demonstrated ex ante in any simple way because, among other reasons, the composition of the team implementing the intervention is important, resulting in a randomized trial or other experiment not being applicable to team implementing the intervention other than the teams from the trial in the context they were operating in during the trial. This sentence really confused me, and I spent a couple of minutes trying to parse it. For anyone else reading, I think "not being applicable to team" is supposed to say "not being applicable to teams".
• slantedview 5y ago
  From the article: > People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the actions company leadership takes impacts everyone in the same way. The people who are most effective will be disproportionately likely to leave if you turn a knob that leads to increased attrition. Damn correct. An observation of mine is that a company may recognize the most valuable employees in informal ways. For example, they may have some peer recognition awards that the same employees get because their peers know how valuable they are, but due to other constraints (ex, politics) they may not hold a title/level that represents this. When the company turns the nob, as Dan says, these most valuable people are the first to leave. Management is mostly oblivious, but the other engineers know.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > A similar thing happens with retention. A great engineer I know who was regularly creating $x0M/yr4 of additional profit for the company per year wanted to move to Portugal, so the company cut the person's cash comp by a factor of four, causing them to leave for a company that doesn't have location-based pay. This was escalated up to the director level, but that wasn't sufficient to override HR, so they left. HR didn't care that the person made the company more money than HR saves by doing location adjustments for all international employees combined because HR at the company had no notion of the value of an employee, only the cost, title, level, and location5. I laughed because I've been on the other end of these conversations (poaching a talented engineer going remote). I guess I have some random HR department to thank!
• skybrian 5y ago
  A team where you have to ask who is going to do the work is one where people can’t get help when they are in trouble. It shouldn’t matter who gets assigned to it first, if they can’t do it, someone with more experience will step in. This is what those stand up meetings were supposed to be for. It’s not supposed to be a meaningless ritual. If people can’t get help, or are afraid to ask for help, something is wrong.
  • zdragnar 5y ago
    An experienced person will likely take half the time of an inexperienced person who gets help. If the inexperienced person pesters the experienced one much that it doesnt take more time, that would imply that the experienced people aren't (on paper) getting much done, because they are too busy teaching to do much else. The actual balance of course depends on the experience gap between the assignee and assigned work, but the notion that any two people on a team will always get the same work done in the same amount of time is silly.
    • skybrian 5y ago
      But this also means you can’t assume a more experienced person will get the job done faster. They will be busy helping others, and that’s not a bug.
• jcims 5y ago
  I'm an introvert, I love working from home, I live in the woods with a 1/3rd mile long driveway. Since my youngest went off to college I'm here alone with her fish and a cat. I go into town once or twice a week for supplies and the rest of the time I'm just out here in my little sanctuary enjoying the lack of people. That said, even I know that while individuals matter, teams matter more. And I don't see anything in this entire post about how to build a team or sustain a team or inspire them to support each other. Absolutely nothing about how you can develop skill and aptitude in junior folks or redirect conflict or conveying the importance of actually shipping something vs running marathons on the tech debt treadmill. You know all the shit that has to happen in the real world to keep people happy and invested. All I see is an ode to the 10x'er and how sucking up to them might keep them around long enough to be successful. I love HN and the community overall but there are few things more predictable than this story making it from new to the front page lol.
  • caffeine 5y ago
    I think the article also applies to teams - in particular, how not to destroy teams by ignoring the individuality of the team members, and indeed of the team itself. Each individual grouping of humans is unique in its social dynamics, relationships, culture, expertise, etc and so will be uniquely effective or ineffective at identifying and achieving desired outcomes.
  • slantedview 5y ago
    Teams are mentioned near the bottom in the section about reorgs.
  • barry-cotter 5y ago
    Previously from danluu.com on the topics you mentioned Company culture matters https://danluu.com/culture/ https://danluu.com/culture/ Different organisations have radically different expectations about how fast and well you can work https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/ Different organisations are capable of different things because of the (kinds of) people who work there https://danluu.com/in-house/ https://danluu.com/in-house/ Two different kinds of oransations work very differently https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/ Different organisations hire differently and this can be an enduring (dis)advantage https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/ Being better than most people isn't that hard because most people aren't trying https://danluu.com/p95-skill/ https://danluu.com/p95-skill/
• rob_c 5y ago
  I've seen projects come in factors of 3 either way depending on the skill set of the individual. Having myself made these mistakes another thing I have to make the effort to extract is "how long would it take me" vs "how long would it have taken me 5years ago before I knew what I know now". It's amazing how many times the "big picture" changes can lead to complete overhauls or rewrites of otherwise consistent and well built software stacks.
• andrewflnr 5y ago
  This is cathartic to read, but I also despair at getting the people who need to hear it to take it seriously. > But many people want the world to be simple This is the source of so much insanity in the world, not just with regard to allocating labor. Details matter, but people who plan "timelines" desperately don't want to hear it. They can go through whole careers without being forced out of the cozy illusion that the world is simple. It's hard to get a man to believe something when his salary depends on it not being true, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, etc.
  • wffurr 5y ago
    There's a great book about this called "Seeing Like a State".
    • Infinitesimus 5y ago
      On that subject - I have read the original yet but I did enjoy this take https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call...
      • spopejoy 5y ago
        Weirdly I find "legibility" a little ... reductionist. It's super-easy to identify the problems with e.g. Stalinism or modern China along these lines. The problem is that humanity is constantly failing in far more chaotic ways too, and what a surprise those are more associated with anarchist capitalism or imperialism, but since they don't reduce to a nice formula you get this somewhat smug analysis of human behavior. Where is the "legibility" problem of the US invasion of Vietnam for instance? There is none because the interests (contain China, destabilize the region) were quite clear, and were achieved, despite the US "losing" the war. (I'm also really sick of the "Gervais Principle" blather so that may be biasing me against the ribbonfarm blog though)
    • wreath 5y ago
      I cannot recommend this book enough.
• thadk 5y ago
  It's certainly not perfect, but it is funny to me that the author on one line complains the Peace Corps "produce[s] little value" but then in the surrounding lines talks about how important it is for individuals to bridge and bring contextual incisive change that consistently resist abstractions and not just look at the problem from the outside. He's falling for his own simplification of individuals and lifetimes. That kind of nuance sounds exactly like the skills Kennedy and his associates were intending to cultivate in individuals from the USA during and returning from Peace Corps when they created the agency: see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American Ugly American (1958). Huge percent of state dept employees. I'd be willing to wager Guinea Worm intervention mentioned involved RPCVs. Notably, Netflix founder, RPCV. It has 3 stated goals. This is essentially one.
  • SavantIdiot 5y ago
    > He's falling for his own simplification of individuals and lifetimes. Totally. > complains the Peace Corps "produce[s] little value" This is what happens when quantitative minds encounter the real world. It's a consequence of putting engineering on a pedestal and ignoring any and all context. However, the top comments on the thread give me hope that many more people see the thought errors in this piece than people who revere it. EDIT: Quanti- not quali-
• dzonga 5y ago
  this is pretty much obvious to people who study and design systems. Russel Ackoff pretty much nailed it by saying: a system is a whole that consists of parts, each of which might affect the whole. taking the best parts from say a toyota and a mercedes won't make the best car. same thing with individuals, in a team you need cohesion. not just the best individuals.
• doitLP 5y ago
  If you want a great book on the subject of management legibility and what is lost when it is imposed, read Seeing Like a State. One of the most eye opening books about the world I’ve ever read.
• lewisl9029 5y ago
  This is also why I really love working with software, because it's one of the greatest force multipliers on the potential impact of an average individual I can think of. We don't have to be once-in-a-decade level genius visionaries or hire a gigantic team with millions in funding to build something that can make the lives of millions of people tangibly better, while capturing some/most of that value in return to improve our own lives. People from all over the world are doing this every day and telling their stories and sharing their learnings on places like https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ and https://bootstrappers.com/ https://bootstrappers.com/. Maybe one day we'll reach a point of diminishing returns where all software that can possibly be built by an individual/small team that adds non-trivial value has already been built, but that's just more motivation for me to try harder today while it's still very much possible.
  • InitialLastName 5y ago
    > build something that can make the lives of millions of people tangibly better, That's why the brightest minds of a generation are dedicated to making surveillance advertising more effective.
  • sdenton4 5y ago
    > "where all software that can possibly be built by an individual/small team that adds non-trivial value has already been built" That's why we make new JavaScript frameworks.
• giga_chad 5y ago
  Why is this blog so ugly and unreadable?
• 5cott0 5y ago
  so do margins
• tzury 5y ago
  an easier to read version - https://outline.com/xrdMdP https://outline.com/xrdMdP
• lkrubner 5y ago
  The one strategy that the article doesn't cover, but which I see often, is where the top leadership says "We need to keep headcount down, but we need to get more software development done, so how can we do it without any extra people? Oh, I know, we will outsource this to an outside agency." And yet, the outside agency costs more than actually adding to the headcount, so it is not cost effective. However, it is seen as temporary, so it this strategy is favored. There is the odd fear that headcount is permanent -- a fear that is mildly true in Europe, but definitely not true, at all, in the USA. Yet in the USA I still see managers who are eager to outsource. The outsourcing tends to become permanent. The idea that it is somehow less permanent than headcount is a pure fiction. But to the main topic, I appreciate this essay for emphasizing that "People are not fungible." I've tried to emphasize this in my own writing. I think, in general, writing about startups would be healthier and more realistic if we had more case studies that emphasized the role of specific individuals, for good or for bad. In my own book, How To Destroy A Tech Startup, I tried to emphasize this: ----------------------------- Emotions matter. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I've worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. More than once, I’ve seen startups self-destruct. I'm making a point about the importance of the individual in a small startup. In a large company, an eccentric individual does not do much damage. Even when such a person is in a leadership position, the company will have a bureaucracy that can ensure some stability. But when a company consists of two, or only a few people, and one of them reacts neurotically to challenges, that company is doomed. I’ll relate one of my previous experiences to illustrate this point. From 2002 to 2008 I spent most of my time working with an entrepreneur who had inherited a few million dollars when he was 25. He managed to burn through much of his legacy in just the time we were colleagues. He admired musicians and considered the music industry glamorous, so he built a sound studio. It never made money. The bands that stopped by were broke. Those few who came up with a hit song mostly signed with a major label which, typically, had its own recording studio. I met him in 2002 when his focus was shifting to the Web. I had developed some software that allowed people to create weblogs. Typepad.com, which offered something similar to what I'd built, had just raised $23 million in funding. Surely we could do the same? Working with him was difficult. We might go like maniacs on some project for four months, and when we were on the brink of unveiling it to the public, he would grow bored with it, and move on to something else. The first time this happened, and I asked him his reasons, he improvised some arguments that sounded plausible. Perhaps he suggested there were already too many startups doing the same thing. But this pattern, where he walked away from a project just when we were ready to introduce it to the public, repeated itself. What led to this self-sabotage? As I met his whole family over the years I got to see the sad dynamics that ate at him. He had a desperate need to impress his father. A modest business success would not be enough, in fact, it would leave him embarrassed. Only the creation of something as big as Google would impress his father. But to grow that big, we would first need to be small, and that was the step he had no patience for. As the years went by, and he burned away all the money he'd inherited, the stress wrecked him. His self-image became increasingly grandiose. He told people that he was a visionary, someone who was able to tell what the future would look like. Late at night he would smoke marijuana and read articles on Slashdot and TechCrunch and then put together an amalgam of words that seemed full of the bright hopes of humanity, which he offered up as our marketing: "The Universe is fundamentally electromagnetic yet non-sentient, and we are sentient but only partly electromagnetic; the Internet is the ultimate harnessing of sentience to the fundamental forces of the Universe. Therefore our software will put you, our customer, in the driver's seat of real-time conscious human evolution." Later, when he wrote up our business plan, he put these two sentences in the Executive Summary. I’m not joking. He had no ability for internal dialogue. Only by talking to others could he hear his own thoughts. At our peak in 2007, we had eight people on our team. Sometimes I would look around the room, when he was talking at everyone, and I would think, “If you add up what we pay all these people, we are spending $300 an hour so that he can have an audience.” When he felt fear about our chances of success, he would need to talk to everyone, and when he was euphoric about our chances of success, he would need to talk to everyone. Therapy would have been cheaper. https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=smashcompany-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=2292ad04b2b6e409785d2e4cdd570c70&creativeASIN=0998997617 https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
• wins32767 5y ago
  The author is conflating two different things here. At large enough scale, almost everyone in a given role is practically interchangeable but there are some people who very much aren't. It's a hard leadership problem to both solve for making 99% of the staff function at a consistently high level while still carving out the exceptions for the 1% that really can move the needle at the company scale. At a the level of a single team, nobody is interchangeable, but both reducing specialization and creating a "we're all in this together" spirit are both important goals for long term team performance (and so people can go on vacation). Both of those problems have different solutions but can feel pretty similar when you're at the receiving end.
• efitz 5y ago
  I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?” Every team I have ever worked with hates planning; every team hates their methodology and thinks it’s stupid and inaccurate and why are those pinhead business people insisting on a date; it’ll be done when it’s done. One of the primary jobs of managers at all levels is to plan and then execute in accordance with the plan. Some managers are good at it, many aren’t- the world is populated with people nearer the center than the ends of the bell curve. So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully. If all you can do is complain and point out unicorn 500x engineers (yeah try hiring for that characteristic, good luck), then I don’t want to hear it. But if you have a practical idea on how to “solve” planning, then you have my full attention.
  • vbezhenar 5y ago
    Stop using methodologies actively preventing any kind of planning (mostly agile stuff). Return to waterfall, write lots of documentations, spend time planning architecture, resist urges to rewrite non-ideal solutions. Do not allow changes. It'll take more time and result will not be as clean. Basically learn from older engineering disciplines.
    • sergio 5y ago
      Also, build several prototypes of every important part of the product in order to learn how long they will take to be made and how each variant will perform, so when you make estimations they are as effective as possible; and then, make integration tests on the selected variants so you can reduce estimation risks due to integration. Just as in every other engineering discipline.
    • RNCTX 5y ago
      The two replies below yours at the moment capture what you're trying to say... > This mentality of thinking is exactly the problem, I think. You want a tool that can solve an entire class of problems. We are telling you that no such tool can exist to do what you want, the problem and the tools don't work that way. Each project should be planned as a snowflake. > This is exactly right and is the biggest problem with "Management" types. They want a "cookie cutter methodology" to solve all their problems so they can be spared thinking through each one. Hence the various "Management" fads and buzzwords. Which is another way to say... if there was a system to do their thing, they wouldn't have to pay smarter people a lot of money to do it. Reliance on a system (any system) tells you that the people don't value your expertise, but rather see you as a cost to be minimized.
• smilekzs 5y ago
  Something along the lines of what was described in this article has recently been forced upon my team. You could imagine how that turned out. Hint: not very differently from the outcomes in the article...
• hunglee2 5y ago
  > A similar thing happens with retention. A great engineer I know who was regularly creating $x0M/yr4 of additional profit for the company per year wanted to move to Portugal, so the company cut the person's cash comp by a factor of four, causing them to leave for a company that doesn't have location-based pay. This was escalated up to the director level, but that wasn't sufficient to override HR, so they left. HR didn't care that the person made the company more money than HR saves by doing location adjustments for all international employees combined because HR at the company had no notion of the value of an employee, only the cost, title, level, and location5 < This is overall a brilliant post by Dan (as usual) but in this case he is harsh on HR; there is also a cultural cost on breaking salary structure for exceptional individual contributors - everyone else gets upset and threatens to leave. HR needs to calculate this, which is more likely the motivator rather than saving a few dollars here and there on a single individuals salary. Individuals matter, but in exaggerating the point, he has neglected to consider teams / groups matter also.
• lucidbee 5y ago
  I think there is a structural problem here that we are avoiding. The reason some higher ups don't see the merit of particular individual developers is that their pay does not reflect their contribution. Pay is the simple metric that should reflect worth, but we don't use 10x or 100x pay scales. We are failing to pay stars and superstars in accordance with the value they contribute to company. profits.
  • jpgvm 5y ago
    This is something I fail to understand. no-one blinks an eye when proposing a high performing CEO he compensated appropriately but propose the same for an engineer and everyone looks at you funny unless you give them a VP title and saddle them with a bunch of non-technical responsibilities in the process. If an engineer is the crucial individual in creating and delivering a product that the companies profits are derived from they should also receive appropriate performance based compensation in line with senior management, perhaps even more as senior management is definitely more fungible (namely C level roles like CFO, etc).
• bobm_kite9 5y ago
  My takeaway is that danluu is saying that, at the small scale, people understand how individuals contribute to teams. But at the large scale (like the HR department) we don't. At the small scale, we're able to apply systems thinking - a team can be viewed as a system composed of a set of interacting parts. However at larger scales, systems thinking becomes unwieldy - the interactions increase quadratically. There, we fall back to the Law of Large Numbers [1]. "Fungibility" and the related failures arise as a result of this. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
  • noduerme 5y ago
    Oddly, though, most critical moments in history have been shaped by (highly error-prone, but non-fungible) individuals, acting on their own.
    • quickthrower2 5y ago
      Good Job we don’t all work for one company
    • bobm_kite9 5y ago
      The law of large number works well for some things (say, shoe sizes) and fails to work for others (e.g. income distributions, which follow a power-law). So it's not odd at all that it would fail to adequately account for people. It's just sad we don't have anything better. Can't we find something better?
      • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
        Power laws apply to individual output as well: https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/ https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
• nkoren 5y ago
  I think the worst of all cognitive biases which humans suffer from is the belief that observations about collectives can be usefully applied to individuals. How much faulty thinking, from racism and sexism onwards, stems from this simple category error?
  • rramadass 5y ago
    Well said and Insightful.
  • rStar 5y ago
    strong disagree. there exist truths on a population level. oxycontin addicts traverse similar behavioral patterns, for example. for the worst of all cognitive biases i would say confirmation bias.
    • interroboink 5y ago
      > there exists truths on a population level. I don't think the person you replied to was claiming otherwise. The problem is when one takes those population-level truths and blindly applies them to individuals. You might be right 80% of the time (or whatever) with that approach, but that doesn't help when you're wrong _this_ time with the specific person in front of you.
      • rStar 5y ago
        > observations about collectives can be usefully applied to individuals. > You might be right 80% of the time or, as in my example of a collective of oxycontin users, you might be able to predict certain of their actions at a 99% efficiency rate, and that may enable you to make statements that apply to the collective as a whole, and as individuals.
        • nkoren 5y ago
          Yep, you're exhibiting precisely that kind of bias. I've known a variety of addicts and there's absolutely no statement one could make about them with 99% certainty that it will apply to a given individual. I don't mean that one should be naive about things. You might correctly observe that a high percentage of Oxycontin addicts exhibit behaviour X, and therefor you might want to keep a wary eye out for that behaviour when dealing with an individual Oxycontin addict. Of course that way lies confirmation bias, which one must also guard against. But it's still better than saying that because most Oxy addicts exhibit trait X, this individual addict will necessarily exhibit trait X. That's worse than confirmation bias becuause it's pre-confirmation bias. You're treating statistics about a group as evidence about an individual -- and that's wrong.
• mro_name 5y ago
  humans are herd animals after all. So big orgs are reluctant to listen to indiviuals but their leaders. They wouldn't do a thing but listening otherwiese - there's just too many individuals. Held a 5min talk about that 2018 https://txt.mro.name/35c3/35c3-dissolving-gafam_--_480p.mp4 https://txt.mro.name/35c3/35c3-dissolving-gafam_--_480p.mp4
• jll29 5y ago
  Indeed, exactly as you say, people are _not_ interchangeable - we know that already since communism relied on that false premise, viewing individuals as just “means of production”, and utterly failed. HR as a function has increasingly become an obstacle rather than a managerial support function in recent years. Instead of personal relations with trusted, long-term people staff, employees and managers get mailing lists attended to by outsourced cheap labor call Center agents. It is CPOs’ and CEOs’ fault that they let greed cut into employee well-being that much, and of course once one company does that, all other corporations adopt the same nonsense, since they all copy playbooks.
• rStar 5y ago
  individuals matter, or, why aren’t we all treated as the special special snowflakes we so obviously believe ourselves to be.