8 ms·

Why Top Talent Leaves

141 points by bedris 15y ago

mmaunder 15y ago
I prefer Marc Andreessen's reason: Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem. Source: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-companies-part-2-reta http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-... (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)
- asdkl234890 15y ago
  The company I work for now is very profitable and growing fast. I can not wait to leave. If I cared mostly about money, I would want to stay.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    I agree; I think the claim that "winning" is what retains people is vaguely on the right track, but the focus on company growth and profits is off-base. A sense that the company is doing interesting things and is where the action is is fairly important, and may or may not be correlated with those things. To take a classic (if admittedly overused) example, nobody at Bell Labs got wealthy from working there; they all made a decent living, but it was emphatically a middle-class living, with no stock-options or six-figure salaries (even when inflation-adjusted). What kept people there was a feeling that this was the best place in the world to work, and at the center of interesting-stuff-happening.
    - Drbble 15y ago
      Yes, but Bell Labs is not a role model. (Many managers were a hassle there too ) There can't be more the than 5% of the industry doing what Bell Labs did or MSR does. So the interesting question for the 95% is, what makes the best of the rest, doing boring but profitable work, better than the rest of the rest? Even at Google, a very desirable corporate job, many engineers aren't really inventing the future.
- ww520 15y ago
  A company might be "winning" but if it doesn't share its winning with its talents, they walk. Basically when they see what they have contributed to the company's profit but not adequately rewarded, they leave.
- dmor 15y ago
  This is short-sighted. Every company I've ever left is winning, it doesn't matter - it's about what I want to do next. Free agent mindset is a bitch for management.
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    John Medaille, an economist whose works I enjoy reading, recently commented on business eithics, and pointed out that most business ethics classes teach how to justify the answers you know your teacher wants and therefore teach a distinct lack of ethics. He suggests, as an alternative, that business ethics should focus on systematic ethics, namely how systems reward or punish ethical behavior. Do you have an organization where the cream rises to the top or where the shit floats? Anyway I wonder if something like that is applicable here. Free agent mindset is a bitch for management because, like business ethics professors, they are mostly interested in how well you comply with their demands. As a result the emphasis is rarely about how you ensure that top talent has the freedom that makes their jobs worthwhile.
    - dmor 15y ago
      From what I can tell, most modern ethicists don't like selfish people. As it turns out, you can be selfish and build teams of people who happily work together. As a manager currently, I can tell you how I deal with free agents ready to do the next thing: I let them go, and plan ahead for their departure.
      - einhverfr 15y ago
        So what do you do about people who: 1) Have a free agent mindset (I can go if I don't like it here) 2) Are more loyal to the company than to their managers, and 3) Have no respect for the chain of command?
        dmor 15y ago
        I hire them as fast as I can, because they change the world and every minute you can have them in your company is amazing. I think of myself as more of a talent agent, not their boss. I have 16 direct reports at Twilio and ~50% of them are this type. I am grateful for every day they wake up and say, "Yes I am happy going to work today". I work to earn that time by supporting their goals and projects, empowering them to set their own course, and sketching a rough outline of the goals we have to achieve. I try to find ways that our mission as a company is aligned with their own passions and interests, and try to keep us in sync around if they're satisfied. And someday, when they leave and build their own things, I will support them and I hope we will have our own Twilio "startup mafia".
michaelochurch 15y ago
Because top talent isn't enough. You also need up-to-date skills, connections, past recognition and opportunity. Most talented people I know live in fear of never getting these things and becoming failures. So people tend to take a fail-fast approach to career changes and move as soon as they aren't getting these things.
- lhnz 15y ago
  The problem with this is that past recognition and connections take time.
craze3 15y ago
"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring." Am I the only one who thought that this was extremely unspecific? Many factors go into managing an organization- I'm curious as to which factors I should focus on to help motivate & reinforce top talent. The only details provided by the author are accountability and reward systems.
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  The list of 10 concrete reasons I found more insightful and useful than the summary provided by the OP.
- asdkl234890 15y ago
  The company I work for now is a big, fast growing and very profitable corporation. It also has a problem retaining top talent. While big and growing and profitable it is noticeably disturbed that the best people keep leaving. It is trying to fix that and failing miserably. Here is what is making me leave. 1. Severe lack of control over how I work. A new, crappy source control tool is being shoved down our throats over our objections. 2. Because it is not a tech company, but a company which happens to have software development department, IT has washed their hands of us, and is in fact in open warfare with us. Fun! 3. Software is always seen as the problem. Just don't take it personally. This was told to me by a very senior manager who has been here for many, many years. 4. Official corporate policy STRONGLY discourages contact between software and the rest of the company. Contact I might use to try and fix that "software is always the problem" perception. But nope, not allowed to try. 5. The director of engineering tends to undercut us at random instances. For example, while I was the tech lead on a project he decided certain documents must not leave the company because they ware too sensitive. I was not consulted. It made my job 10x more difficult. Other documents which contained the exact same information + more, were sent out like free hot cakes. 6. A couple of hyper confrontational, screaming, perfectionist control freaks which are cronies of the director of engineering and I happen to report to one of them. Not actually the worst boss possible. Within that loud control freak perfectionist there is a mostly rational engineer. Who is also very technically competent. He just sucks big time as a manager and dealing with him is incredibly emotionally exhausting. At one point he become so frustrated with another member of our team he literally gave up on him and dumped managing him in my lap. My management of him consisted of talking to him calmly. This resulted in him over-delivering on all his assigned tasks. 7. Corporate red tape bullshit bureaucracy. 8. My team has a few open positions (go figure!) one of them happens to be damn near identical to mine, the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid. This is after I have asked for a raise. After I took a huge project that was supposed to be a train wreck, saved it, shipped it on time, and made a ton of money for the company. I have an interview with another smaller company at the end of this week.
dkarl 15y ago
"Poor people management" isn't specific enough, and it doesn't explain why top contributors are more likely to leave than mediocre contributors. It's a very specific form of poor management: treating technical people as interchangeable, and therefore assuming that all technical people are mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and judgment only exist in management. When people really, really swallow the Kool-Aid of management as the ultimate masters of the universe, as they must in certain large corporations, they start to think of management as the final step in human development: infant, child, adolescent, worker, manager. Some people linger on one step of maturation or another (literally "retarded") and that's fine, as long as they accept the natural order of things, right? Apparently that approach works for some corporations. Getting rid of top contributors at least makes management's belief structure valid and gives their world a kind of simplicity and intellectual coherence that's hard to achieve on a large scale. (If you can't help believing something that isn't true, you had better make sure it is true in the part of the world you care about.) Good managers know the people they manage and know their diverse capabilities. That's hard work, though, so it isn't for everyone.
- Domenic_S 15y ago
  This article might have been wrong for HN -- filed in the Leadership section of Forbes, the author specifically calls out "very senior executive[s]" as a narrower focus on the original article.
  - dmor 15y ago
    I think this post is PERFECT for HN. Because the people here are already the top 10% of developers, but I'd be willing to bet they have the most need for development in their management skills. Where can we get a HN for business people (who are rational, which is why I'd rather read this site any day)? I'd call it "Hustler News" btw
    - GFischer 15y ago
      Aren't enterpreneurs supposed to have some business skills too :) . I guess HN should cater to both technical and non-technical founders - maybe a sub-area of HN? (I know that's probably not in pg's intentions, and sounds a lot like the Reddit approach).
lsb 15y ago
You can gauge someone's ranking in an organization explicitly and implicitly. Sometimes implicit beats explicit. The explicit is performance reviews, which can be cherry-picked. The implicit is the list of projects someone was entrusted to work with. People will more freely give the gamut of projects they've worked on than the gamut of performance reviews they've gotten, and most clever people realize this, so after a few dud projects they look elsewhere.
zobzu 15y ago
"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring." Can't get closer to the truth.
kylemaxwell 15y ago
Woefully incomplete. The article doesn't seem to recognize that talented folks can leave because their own goals have changed. Perhaps an engineer is ready to try new challenges that simply aren't applicable at the organization, or perhaps a manager has had a lifestyle change that drives her to resign. Anytime somebody tells me "there's only one reason this happens," I get suspicious. Life is far more complicated than that.
- aDemoUzer 15y ago
  Agree. I am leaving, not because of management but because I want to begin a startup.
tsunamifury 15y ago
I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem: When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans constant individual compromise, so they leave. Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So they stay.
- DrStalker 15y ago
  There comes a point where having a few exceptional programmers is no longer enough to deliver a project, so more and more process starts getting wrapped around the software life-cycle to manage the larger team. Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy task.
  - Domenic_S 15y ago
    If I'm a homebuilder and in my crew I have 5 average-ability builders and one exceptional tile guy, I can't be expected to let the tile guy run the show. I might treat him differently -- give him plans and let him run with them, let him be responsible for meeting his own deadlines and so forth, but in no circumstance can I let that tile guy have total free reign over a home project... and in all honesty, he probably doesn't want it. I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of your machine. I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and 3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
spodek 15y ago
Eight of the most important words I learned in management, leadership, and choosing jobs, from a professor of mine: "People join good projects and leave bad management"
- trustfundbaby 15y ago
  lovely quote. Is there a source for that?
  - spodek 15y ago
    Thanks. I posted a few words on it a while ago -- http://joshuaspodek.com/people-join-good-projects-leave http://joshuaspodek.com/people-join-good-projects-leave -- that says the professor I heard it from, Michael Feiner, plus links to more about him.
pasbesoin 15y ago
In a word: Asshattery. More often but not always, brought on by shrinking resources -- whether real, or perceived/projected/created by management as part of a agenda regardless of financial state.
lani 15y ago
top talent is like an $800 coffee machine. If you ain't gonna use it or appreciate the fine coffee it makes, there are others who will. and the coffee machine insists of being appreciated every moment .
- michaelochurch 15y ago
  Average people are like cars: capable of average speeds reliably and high speeds unsafely. The most talented people are like airplanes. Fly them slow and they tend to crash.
- megablast 15y ago
  That analogy is awful. You can buy a $800 coffee machine, and put it on the factory floor unused for 10 years, and it will not make a difference.
  - ArtB 15y ago
    Actually that seems like a good analogy. If you have a $800 coffee machine but are serving it to people who won't appreciate it, it's going to waste. I've heard HR people asking about how to attract top talent when all the company does is build simple CRUD apps.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Keep in mind that there will always be a delay between when you've unalterably lost someone good and when that person actually leaves the company. Financial, social, mental, and professional inertia is a real thing. And a job is in many ways a relationship like a romantic relationship, like a marriage. When is a marriage irretrievably broken? If you take the moment that the divorce actually happened and you rewind say, 1 day, it seems unlikely that you could get the couple to reconcile then if they were irreconcilable just the day after. And in all likelihood you'd have to go back years to get to a point where reconciliation would be possible, where one or the other of them had not made the decision in their heart, perhaps without even consciously being aware of it, that the relationship was over and on a denouement to eventual permanent separation. The same dynamics apply to employment. If you rewind the clock one day or one year from the point of separation you probably cannot fundamentally change the glide slope that results in an exit from the company. And like marriage and divorce the "reasons" are probably not so simple, not down to one solitary action or cause. More likely it's due to an incompatibility of life goals, lack of mutual respect, failure to communicate openly with one another, and problems with basic chemistry. I have seen employees (good, high-caliber talent) who are immensely passionate about their job and they keep throwing themselves into the maw of rejection that their local corporate culture exudes. They keep banging away trying to make things better. Nine times out of ten they get rejected outright, and the 10th time they get dragged over broken glass getting one little change made. That sort of thing wears on a person just as surely as fighting with a spouse drags on a person. And one day things just start to click a little differently and they see a future where they are no longer working at that company, and they don't hate the idea.
- kamaal 15y ago
  I agree with you in principle. But an employment isn't the same as a relationship with a Person. Life in most large corporates starts with heightened expectation in the first few weeks/days and from there on its a constant decline and a complete mismatch in what the person expected and what the actual reality is. My experiences have been horrible, I've seen a never ending timeline of nepotism, biased behaviors and partiality in large companies. Endless bureaucracy, politics and socialist style of 'one works, everyone else leeches on him' style of working very common. Its this bitter fact is what causes the maximum attrition of good people from the company and not the inevitable boredom that happens with historical baggage.
mbesto 15y ago
Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Manage those correctly for your employees and you'll have a happy organization.
johnhess 15y ago
"what do you aspire to bring to the world?" Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times, yes. If you're asking me to dedicate my waking hours to something, be clear about what that something is. Hint: It's not your corporation. I've interviewed at several companies, and the only ones I rejected out of hand are the ones that are just "doing business" and have ceased to chase some vision. Some companies do really cool stuff, but have no vision (e.g. most of Lockheed Martin) whereas there are companies who do something seemingly less exciting (e.g. Yelp) that have a vision for how they're going to change the world. In Yelp's case, they're helping great businesses thrive and be found and holding bad companies accountable. As an Aero guy, I'd be predisposed to Lockheed, but frankly, when I talked to Yelp, that kind of thinking made all the difference.

141 points by bedris 15y ago

I prefer Marc Andreessen's reason: Companies that have a retention problem usually have a winning problem. Or rather, a "not winning" problem. Source: http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-companies-part-2-reta http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-big-... (original seems to be deleted from blog.pmarca.com)

asdkl234890 15y ago
The company I work for now is very profitable and growing fast. I can not wait to leave. If I cared mostly about money, I would want to stay.
- _delirium 15y ago
  I agree; I think the claim that "winning" is what retains people is vaguely on the right track, but the focus on company growth and profits is off-base. A sense that the company is doing interesting things and is where the action is is fairly important, and may or may not be correlated with those things. To take a classic (if admittedly overused) example, nobody at Bell Labs got wealthy from working there; they all made a decent living, but it was emphatically a middle-class living, with no stock-options or six-figure salaries (even when inflation-adjusted). What kept people there was a feeling that this was the best place in the world to work, and at the center of interesting-stuff-happening.
  - Drbble 15y ago
    Yes, but Bell Labs is not a role model. (Many managers were a hassle there too ) There can't be more the than 5% of the industry doing what Bell Labs did or MSR does. So the interesting question for the 95% is, what makes the best of the rest, doing boring but profitable work, better than the rest of the rest? Even at Google, a very desirable corporate job, many engineers aren't really inventing the future.
ww520 15y ago
A company might be "winning" but if it doesn't share its winning with its talents, they walk. Basically when they see what they have contributed to the company's profit but not adequately rewarded, they leave.
dmor 15y ago
This is short-sighted. Every company I've ever left is winning, it doesn't matter - it's about what I want to do next. Free agent mindset is a bitch for management.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  John Medaille, an economist whose works I enjoy reading, recently commented on business eithics, and pointed out that most business ethics classes teach how to justify the answers you know your teacher wants and therefore teach a distinct lack of ethics. He suggests, as an alternative, that business ethics should focus on systematic ethics, namely how systems reward or punish ethical behavior. Do you have an organization where the cream rises to the top or where the shit floats? Anyway I wonder if something like that is applicable here. Free agent mindset is a bitch for management because, like business ethics professors, they are mostly interested in how well you comply with their demands. As a result the emphasis is rarely about how you ensure that top talent has the freedom that makes their jobs worthwhile.
  - dmor 15y ago
    From what I can tell, most modern ethicists don't like selfish people. As it turns out, you can be selfish and build teams of people who happily work together. As a manager currently, I can tell you how I deal with free agents ready to do the next thing: I let them go, and plan ahead for their departure.
    - einhverfr 15y ago
      So what do you do about people who: 1) Have a free agent mindset (I can go if I don't like it here) 2) Are more loyal to the company than to their managers, and 3) Have no respect for the chain of command?
      - dmor 15y ago
        I hire them as fast as I can, because they change the world and every minute you can have them in your company is amazing. I think of myself as more of a talent agent, not their boss. I have 16 direct reports at Twilio and ~50% of them are this type. I am grateful for every day they wake up and say, "Yes I am happy going to work today". I work to earn that time by supporting their goals and projects, empowering them to set their own course, and sketching a rough outline of the goals we have to achieve. I try to find ways that our mission as a company is aligned with their own passions and interests, and try to keep us in sync around if they're satisfied. And someday, when they leave and build their own things, I will support them and I hope we will have our own Twilio "startup mafia".

michaelochurch 15y ago

Because top talent isn't enough. You also need up-to-date skills, connections, past recognition and opportunity. Most talented people I know live in fear of never getting these things and becoming failures. So people tend to take a fail-fast approach to career changes and move as soon as they aren't getting these things.

lhnz 15y ago
The problem with this is that past recognition and connections take time.

craze3 15y ago

"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring." Am I the only one who thought that this was extremely unspecific? Many factors go into managing an organization- I'm curious as to which factors I should focus on to help motivate & reinforce top talent. The only details provided by the author are accountability and reward systems.

michaelochurch 15y ago
The list of 10 concrete reasons I found more insightful and useful than the summary provided by the OP.
asdkl234890 15y ago
The company I work for now is a big, fast growing and very profitable corporation. It also has a problem retaining top talent. While big and growing and profitable it is noticeably disturbed that the best people keep leaving. It is trying to fix that and failing miserably. Here is what is making me leave. 1. Severe lack of control over how I work. A new, crappy source control tool is being shoved down our throats over our objections. 2. Because it is not a tech company, but a company which happens to have software development department, IT has washed their hands of us, and is in fact in open warfare with us. Fun! 3. Software is always seen as the problem. Just don't take it personally. This was told to me by a very senior manager who has been here for many, many years. 4. Official corporate policy STRONGLY discourages contact between software and the rest of the company. Contact I might use to try and fix that "software is always the problem" perception. But nope, not allowed to try. 5. The director of engineering tends to undercut us at random instances. For example, while I was the tech lead on a project he decided certain documents must not leave the company because they ware too sensitive. I was not consulted. It made my job 10x more difficult. Other documents which contained the exact same information + more, were sent out like free hot cakes. 6. A couple of hyper confrontational, screaming, perfectionist control freaks which are cronies of the director of engineering and I happen to report to one of them. Not actually the worst boss possible. Within that loud control freak perfectionist there is a mostly rational engineer. Who is also very technically competent. He just sucks big time as a manager and dealing with him is incredibly emotionally exhausting. At one point he become so frustrated with another member of our team he literally gave up on him and dumped managing him in my lap. My management of him consisted of talking to him calmly. This resulted in him over-delivering on all his assigned tasks. 7. Corporate red tape bullshit bureaucracy. 8. My team has a few open positions (go figure!) one of them happens to be damn near identical to mine, the position is advertised for 20K more than I am getting paid. This is after I have asked for a raise. After I took a huge project that was supposed to be a train wreck, saved it, shipped it on time, and made a ton of money for the company. I have an interview with another smaller company at the end of this week.

dkarl 15y ago

"Poor people management" isn't specific enough, and it doesn't explain why top contributors are more likely to leave than mediocre contributors. It's a very specific form of poor management: treating technical people as interchangeable, and therefore assuming that all technical people are mediocre, and therefore assuming that maturity and judgment only exist in management. When people really, really swallow the Kool-Aid of management as the ultimate masters of the universe, as they must in certain large corporations, they start to think of management as the final step in human development: infant, child, adolescent, worker, manager. Some people linger on one step of maturation or another (literally "retarded") and that's fine, as long as they accept the natural order of things, right? Apparently that approach works for some corporations. Getting rid of top contributors at least makes management's belief structure valid and gives their world a kind of simplicity and intellectual coherence that's hard to achieve on a large scale. (If you can't help believing something that isn't true, you had better make sure it is true in the part of the world you care about.) Good managers know the people they manage and know their diverse capabilities. That's hard work, though, so it isn't for everyone.

Domenic_S 15y ago
This article might have been wrong for HN -- filed in the Leadership section of Forbes, the author specifically calls out "very senior executive[s]" as a narrower focus on the original article.
- dmor 15y ago
  I think this post is PERFECT for HN. Because the people here are already the top 10% of developers, but I'd be willing to bet they have the most need for development in their management skills. Where can we get a HN for business people (who are rational, which is why I'd rather read this site any day)? I'd call it "Hustler News" btw
  - GFischer 15y ago
    Aren't enterpreneurs supposed to have some business skills too :) . I guess HN should cater to both technical and non-technical founders - maybe a sub-area of HN? (I know that's probably not in pg's intentions, and sounds a lot like the Reddit approach).

lsb 15y ago

You can gauge someone's ranking in an organization explicitly and implicitly. Sometimes implicit beats explicit. The explicit is performance reviews, which can be cherry-picked. The implicit is the list of projects someone was entrusted to work with. People will more freely give the gamut of projects they've worked on than the gamut of performance reviews they've gotten, and most clever people realize this, so after a few dud projects they look elsewhere.

zobzu 15y ago

"Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring." Can't get closer to the truth.

kylemaxwell 15y ago

Woefully incomplete. The article doesn't seem to recognize that talented folks can leave because their own goals have changed. Perhaps an engineer is ready to try new challenges that simply aren't applicable at the organization, or perhaps a manager has had a lifestyle change that drives her to resign. Anytime somebody tells me "there's only one reason this happens," I get suspicious. Life is far more complicated than that.

aDemoUzer 15y ago
Agree. I am leaving, not because of management but because I want to begin a startup.

tsunamifury 15y ago

I've come to a pragmatic conclusion about this problem: When an organization becomes very large, serious individual compromises for the sake of organizational effeciency become necessary. These compromises happen for the sake of allowing teams interact with hundreds or thousands of other developers to produce a large product (often at the oversight of a nontechnical executive). This is a serious turnoff to star workers who are self confident and prefer to do things their own way. Said star workers know their own worth and would prefer to work on their own terms again sans constant individual compromise, so they leave. Mediocre programmers, lacking the confidence to leave, have a much larger threshold for such individual compromises for the sake of the organization. So they stay.

DrStalker 15y ago
There comes a point where having a few exceptional programmers is no longer enough to deliver a project, so more and more process starts getting wrapped around the software life-cycle to manage the larger team. Striking a balance between enough process to keep everything on track and allow PMS to make predictions about the project timeline while not stifling your best programmers with a system they end up working against is not an easy task.
- Domenic_S 15y ago
  If I'm a homebuilder and in my crew I have 5 average-ability builders and one exceptional tile guy, I can't be expected to let the tile guy run the show. I might treat him differently -- give him plans and let him run with them, let him be responsible for meeting his own deadlines and so forth, but in no circumstance can I let that tile guy have total free reign over a home project... and in all honesty, he probably doesn't want it. I'm not sure the analogy works, but this was my struggle moving from startups to enterprise environments. Personal contribution matters, but there can be no heroes, because the totality of the business is immense. This thinking requires a bit of abstraction on the business side and coming to terms with the fact that you're a member of a team (and there are many other teams all with different relative importance). A cog in the machine? Perhaps, but a startup is just a tiny machine, and when you scale, as is the nature of a successful startup, you do so by adding cogs and thus increasing the size of your machine. I firmly believe that process doesn't really keep things "on track" as much as it forces the business the choose between competing priorities, and it forces communication. It doesn't matter if it's Agile, XP, whatever -- you need three things for process to work: 1) defined owners with the authority to set priorities, 2) defined intervals when those priorities can't be changed, and 3) agreement between the involved parties that they'll stick to the process.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

spodek 15y ago

Eight of the most important words I learned in management, leadership, and choosing jobs, from a professor of mine: "People join good projects and leave bad management"

trustfundbaby 15y ago
lovely quote. Is there a source for that?
- spodek 15y ago
  Thanks. I posted a few words on it a while ago -- http://joshuaspodek.com/people-join-good-projects-leave http://joshuaspodek.com/people-join-good-projects-leave -- that says the professor I heard it from, Michael Feiner, plus links to more about him.

pasbesoin 15y ago

In a word: Asshattery. More often but not always, brought on by shrinking resources -- whether real, or perceived/projected/created by management as part of a agenda regardless of financial state.

lani 15y ago

top talent is like an $800 coffee machine. If you ain't gonna use it or appreciate the fine coffee it makes, there are others who will. and the coffee machine insists of being appreciated every moment .

michaelochurch 15y ago
Average people are like cars: capable of average speeds reliably and high speeds unsafely. The most talented people are like airplanes. Fly them slow and they tend to crash.
megablast 15y ago
That analogy is awful. You can buy a $800 coffee machine, and put it on the factory floor unused for 10 years, and it will not make a difference.
- ArtB 15y ago
  Actually that seems like a good analogy. If you have a $800 coffee machine but are serving it to people who won't appreciate it, it's going to waste. I've heard HR people asking about how to attract top talent when all the company does is build simple CRUD apps.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

Keep in mind that there will always be a delay between when you've unalterably lost someone good and when that person actually leaves the company. Financial, social, mental, and professional inertia is a real thing. And a job is in many ways a relationship like a romantic relationship, like a marriage. When is a marriage irretrievably broken? If you take the moment that the divorce actually happened and you rewind say, 1 day, it seems unlikely that you could get the couple to reconcile then if they were irreconcilable just the day after. And in all likelihood you'd have to go back years to get to a point where reconciliation would be possible, where one or the other of them had not made the decision in their heart, perhaps without even consciously being aware of it, that the relationship was over and on a denouement to eventual permanent separation. The same dynamics apply to employment. If you rewind the clock one day or one year from the point of separation you probably cannot fundamentally change the glide slope that results in an exit from the company. And like marriage and divorce the "reasons" are probably not so simple, not down to one solitary action or cause. More likely it's due to an incompatibility of life goals, lack of mutual respect, failure to communicate openly with one another, and problems with basic chemistry. I have seen employees (good, high-caliber talent) who are immensely passionate about their job and they keep throwing themselves into the maw of rejection that their local corporate culture exudes. They keep banging away trying to make things better. Nine times out of ten they get rejected outright, and the 10th time they get dragged over broken glass getting one little change made. That sort of thing wears on a person just as surely as fighting with a spouse drags on a person. And one day things just start to click a little differently and they see a future where they are no longer working at that company, and they don't hate the idea.

kamaal 15y ago
I agree with you in principle. But an employment isn't the same as a relationship with a Person. Life in most large corporates starts with heightened expectation in the first few weeks/days and from there on its a constant decline and a complete mismatch in what the person expected and what the actual reality is. My experiences have been horrible, I've seen a never ending timeline of nepotism, biased behaviors and partiality in large companies. Endless bureaucracy, politics and socialist style of 'one works, everyone else leeches on him' style of working very common. Its this bitter fact is what causes the maximum attrition of good people from the company and not the inevitable boredom that happens with historical baggage.

mbesto 15y ago

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. Manage those correctly for your employees and you'll have a happy organization.

johnhess 15y ago

"what do you aspire to bring to the world?" Yes. Yes. Yes. One thousand times, yes. If you're asking me to dedicate my waking hours to something, be clear about what that something is. Hint: It's not your corporation. I've interviewed at several companies, and the only ones I rejected out of hand are the ones that are just "doing business" and have ceased to chase some vision. Some companies do really cool stuff, but have no vision (e.g. most of Lockheed Martin) whereas there are companies who do something seemingly less exciting (e.g. Yelp) that have a vision for how they're going to change the world. In Yelp's case, they're helping great businesses thrive and be found and holding bad companies accountable. As an Aero guy, I'd be predisposed to Lockheed, but frankly, when I talked to Yelp, that kind of thinking made all the difference.