14 ms·

27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

393 points by jey 3y ago

aaronbrethorst 3y ago
Ostensibly (2006)
anonreeeeplor 3y ago
Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC. Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output. Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star. Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.” Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there. A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity. The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.” You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star. That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.
- anonreeeeplor 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    If you count negative value developers I can totally believe in a 10x one. It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers. Realistically, they would be very uncommon, and odds are that your small company has 0 of them. Of the developers I know that are actual superstars when compared to average developers, they have zero problem displaying their value and make upwards of 7 figures. All of them are aged 40+ too. So, yeah, I don't have a problem with the concept. I just think it gets misapplied.
    - robocat 3y ago
      > It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers. Who labelled them? The self-labelled are often crappy. The last superstar I worked with seemed like a Cro-Magnon developer. He used outdated tech, didn't understand many modern dev techniques. However he was extremely productive (he was very very good at concentrating on necessary outcomes and ignoring make work). His value was _far_ more than 10x the average developer. He certainly didn't seem to be valuable. Despite his serious faults he produced gold. He was wildly undervalued by other developers. Keep your eyes open - some superstars are invisible. This especially holds in other soft areas like marketing.
      - walteweiss 3y ago
        Somehow I imagine a dev who works in vim (or emacs if you please), does not multitask like crazy, and read books instead of social networks or even hacker news. For some reason he doesn’t know git. Or no, not git. He despises docker. That’s who I imagined.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Well, if you have developers with negative value, and a 10x developer... 10x a negative is even more negative.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  Another reason why today's corporations love teams and flat hierarchies is because they turn "responsibility" into a post-modern concept that fluidly adapts to mean everything or nothing. One day the boss is the boss, the next day nobody is accountable for anything, and decisions are really just the magical synergy of team dynamics.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - baazaa 3y ago
    The notion of 'culture' does this. It's a meaningless term. No-one ever says 'we fixed the business culture but the company still isn't delivering', because the culture is always inferred from the results. So as a concept it has no explanatory power whatsoever; it only obfuscates, providing a convenient cover for incompetent managers who can say dumb things like 'culture is hard to change'. I work in the public service where accountability has been transformed from a concrete thing (who is responsible for this?) to a 'value'. So the org chart is set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, the processes are set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, but if you point this out managers will retort that it doesn't matter, because what's really important is that everyone personally commits to the value of accountability which in turn will create a culture of accountability. They've replaced performance reviews with workers writing about how much they embrace accountability (of course the absence of genuine reviews helps ensure no-one can be held accountable for poor performance). I'm increasingly of the opinion that any manager who talks at length about culture is a moron. It's a fuzzy catch-all that can be invoked to explain anything without understanding anything, of great value to the modern manager who typically understands nothing.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    So called flat hierarchies also mean that the ones that have the real power can never be truly challenged. It is like climbing the hill and then cutting the rope to ensure nobody else can do it. I've seem this a lot in companies adopting agile. That was always a cabal that had all the real power and the benefits than come with it, but suddenly because of "self-organizing", "flat hierarchy", there was no more any more or less formal path for ascending in the organization. During the first years of the scrum frenzy, the figure of the tech lead almost disappeared in a lot of companies.
- billy99k 3y ago
  "Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star." This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I admit I was sometimes carried. In creative work this is bound to happen. All people firing on all cylinders and coordinating well is a rarity in creative work. It might work in a kitchen or sailing boat though.
    - chii 3y ago
      There's several types of "carrying". You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff. This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them. The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same. This is the type i admire and want to work with.
      - gthink 3y ago
        That's a very succint description of the arrogant person and the one whom everyone mislabels as arrogant.
      - rightbyte 3y ago
        Ye. "Super stars" are often just people that stampede the other devs. Like, working together is so inefficient in bigger teams that someone let loose will appear very productive, but he is slowing down everyone else.
      - 3y ago
- 1over137 3y ago
  >That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently. Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?
- glitchc 3y ago
  Actually, that's how the world works most of the time. Superstars also know it and are used to it from early childhood. They are expected to carry the load and equally importantly, the team is expected to listen to them. It works like this in all walks of life, because simply put, human beings are not equal in ability. Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves. Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    That makes sense until you consider that the world (and any team) is "sprinkled" with a lot more narcissists and know-it-alls than geniuses!
    - bornfreddy 3y ago
      It still makes sense. The group that listens to these people instead of real superstars (assuming it has any) is at disadvantage.
      - anonreeeeplor 3y ago
        If I mentioned the company, and you would recognize it, you would understand the catastrophic non performance of this company for a decade. All the old management are still in place despite several ceo changes and it has become the poster child for failed big company. you can even read the glass door reviews. Thousands of posts say the same thing I am saying: The bad people gang up on the good people and that’s why I left.
        bornfreddy 3y ago
        You misunderstood me - I agree with GP, I'm just pointing out that the GGP's comment still holds. The company is at a disadvantage because of that. But yes, it is difficult to change company culture.
- walteweiss 3y ago
  Have you ever tried freelancing or having your own company? I never worked in corporations and honestly cannot see myself ever there, considering the money I’d been making freelancing will never be paid to me by any company in the world if they’d just hire me.
- fxtentacle 3y ago
  That's why I incorporated a tiny company. Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.
  - mettamage 3y ago
    I wonder if you ask them about this discrepancy and how they view it. Personally, I find it weird, but wonder how they'd justify the 1.5x expense.
    - cyberpunk 3y ago
      Contractors can be billed to a project, it’s much easier to pass with the finance dept than justifying why one new hire should get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets.
      - chii 3y ago
        > get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets. some enterprising manager realizes this, makes up a new job title (that sound important) to justify the 4x salary, and thus lead to job title inflation as other people sees such a title earning high.
      - pydry 3y ago
        It's justifying why the new hire gets more than their manager that is really hard. It's also easier to book a high fixed cost than a high ongoing cost.
      - FullyFunctional 3y ago
        Contractors are easier to hire and much easier to fire than permanent employees. I've had both good and absolutely terrible experience with QoR of contractors, but IMO the biggest problem is the loss of institutional knowledge when the contract ends. No amount of reports makes up for the warm body in the room that can say, "actually, the reason for this is ...".
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Corporations that win tend to have bought themselves a moat and therefore profit to play with akin to a stipend to spend on staff. The people controlling that spend need more than anything else to look competent in their job of managing it, and so they need to work by numbers and follow safe trends. Whatever will keep them in their high paid jobs. Teasing out superstars and giving them free reign is probably not what they are incentivized to do.
- mediumsmart 3y ago
  What does it mean “dragging a division of 30 people”? That you need to hire 29 instances of the worst and least talented garbage to push just one lonely little sad superman?
- icedchai 3y ago
  I’ve seen this many times. Only exception was an early stage startup where they really only hired extremely solid folks. Larger or even small but very hierarchical companies have been full of mediocre performers.
- 015a 3y ago
  One strong argument (maybe the only one) for the concept of controlling superstar players is the reality that they are going to leave, eventually; maybe for a better job, maybe retirement, maybe they get hit by a bus. If your output is entirely dependent on a superstar, it inevitably won't be durable against their departure; one way to look at corporations is through the lens of efficiency maximizers, but another equally valid way of thinking about them is through the lens of durability maximizers. The day-to-day actions of most people inside a corporation is far better pattern-matched toward Survivability, not Efficiency. Take any company, and grade it (personally!) on both "how ideologically driven is their mission" and "how productive are they"; eight times out of ten it'll correlate. New companies like OpenAI ("we're inventing machine intelligence"; strong ideology/mission); extremely productive. Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, extremely strong, important mission, extremely productive. Some smaller companies like 37Signals, very ideologically/personality driven, very productive. There's even a few big tech companies left, like Cloudflare, that have strong, coherent mission drive ("Building A Better Internet") and have productivity to match it. One counter-example (and why its, like, eight out of ten): Microsoft. No one has any clue what Microsoft's mission is. That product factory still churns out more new stuff than anyone on the west coast. Those two paragraphs are 100% connected, because roughly the only way to mitigate (not eliminate) the risk of superstars leaving is high, coherent mission drive. "High" means "its clear, its communicated, its meaningful" and "coherent" means "its practiced, its demonstrated, its genuine". Compensation is another way, but the problems with compensation are (1) you will lose the compensation fight with competitors eventually, (2) it selects for actors that aren't interested in anything except compensation, and (3) it breeds complacency/retirement without simultaneous high+coherent mission drive (Nvidia's problem right now). Oxide [1] is an interesting case-study in mitigating some negative impacts of high compensation; "Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location." It just comes down to: Poor Leadership. If the product is boring, if leadership can't coherently communicate mission, direction, value, etc; superstars aren't going to join or stay for very long. Everything else is window dressing. In the absence of that, the most effective way to maintain continuity of operations is normalization and "the bell curve". Also: If you find yourself believing "well, some companies just don't operate in an area where high mission drive is even possible, not every company is on the bleeding edge of AI CryptoTech", just stop. I don't care what you're doing; building a high, coherent mission is always possible. Amazon's mission is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. That's a freakin awesome mission that would resonate with a ton of superstars, and its a mission that every damn company could have, if their leadership chooses it and is high quality enough to live it. [1] https://oxide.computer/careers https://oxide.computer/careers
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  > That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently. In my "big tech company", there's a thorough (and I think overall fair) evaluation process, and a very high performer can earn a significant amount of money, e.g. 10x the salary of a junior. People are also strongly incentized to deliver through bonuses and stock refresher. I'm not denying that what you describe exists in some (most?) companies, but there are tons of companies out there, and it's also up to employees to do their homework and find places that suits their values and ambitions. They do exist!
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    A junior at BigTech averages around $170K. Are you really saying a high performer can make $1.7 million in compensation a year? I’m sure there are a very few that do.
    - saagarjha 3y ago
      Sure, but there are very few high performers.
    - yodsanklai 3y ago
      Look at Google [1] and Meta [2], this seems to be in the ballpark. There are people with such high salaries, but they are very few and more than just high-performers. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
  - bornfreddy 3y ago
    Ok, seriously curious - how does this evaluation process look like, at least in broad strokes? I haven't yet seen one that would make incentives aligned, but you got my hopes up. :)
  - asveikau 3y ago
    My experience with those big companies and those tough but allegedly fair review processes is that management has no idea who is actually doing the work, and disproportionately compensates people they like on a personal level, unfairly. The bias reenforces itself when the "top performers" are preferentially assigned prestigious work that can look good on the next review. You can tell who the stupidest people in the organization are by the faith they have in the fairness and appropriateness of the review system.
- ken47 3y ago
  I think this varies by corporation, but large corporations at their root have a desire to treat their employees as cogs, because that is the simplest system for them to implement. It is on the employees to make it clear that they are not cogs, which is why politics tends to be a much bigger factor in such companies. If your corporation is not compensating you enough to deal with the additional headache of politics, I'd try working for a smaller company.
- ozim 3y ago
  Corporations are legal entities to be composition of worker ants to achieve far bigger goals than single „rock star” ever can. Idea is that they will outlive any human life or it would be possible to detach from any single person. There is of course cost attached of not being fully efficient, but that is irrelevant in bigger scale.
- conradev 3y ago
  Your zero sum outlook assumes that everyone does the same job, when the primary point of a convening an organization is combining different specializations and dividing labor accordingly.
- mamp 3y ago
  I agree with your assessment. The real challenge is how can organisations best leverage super stars to achieve great things. It's difficult because managers have to be smart and confident, and the super star can't be allowed to undermine others. The high prevalence of insecure managers and arrogant super stars makes this hard to do.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Interestingly, every time I see this argument brought up the people who do so seem to count themselves as part of either the average or superstar bucket ;)
- ak_111 3y ago
  You never saw it go differently but it must be in many organisation. I can't imagine you can sustain the technical excellence over decades in places like Nvidia, Apple, Nintendo, ... without having a very robust process of protecting high-performance deeply technical people from wider organisational politics.
- jimnotgym 3y ago
  This all makes sense for knowledge workers, but what about the rest of the world? In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office. Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up. This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?
  - hef19898 3y ago
    This hero worshippong always puzzles me. All real world examples, from certified sport super stars to actual rock stars, show us that the proverbial employee rockstar is a myth. No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them. A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon. Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.
    - thereisnospork 3y ago
      >Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad. The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.
      - hef19898 3y ago
        I didn't say anything about salaries, did I? Which team so do you think would do better: - Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs - the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys What do you think?
- huijzer 3y ago
  Customers want consistency. That’s why management turns people into a reliable system where anyone can quit without affecting the outcome of the system. Just like engineers think about software as a system, business people think about companies as a system. McDonalds is the prime example of this. If you enter one of the stores, it doesn’t matter whether John or Dave is in that day. The burger will be the same. Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.
- asveikau 3y ago
  This seems like something between a conspiracy theory and your own ego going unchecked. I observed something like this, or at least I thought I did. With many more years of reflection, and there were hints along the way as it happened in realtime, I came to realize that the contribution of those I had written off as non-performers and dead weight was actually higher than I had estimated and difficult to actually quantify. My hope for you is that you one day reach similar epiphanies. Because your attitude that some are much better than others and need to be compensated out of proportion is quite toxic. Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    My personal theory is that the most important person at a company, the one most responsible for the company's success, isn't the president or CEO. It's not the star contributor or the one who writes the most lines of code. It's whoever makes the coffee. Because without the coffee, a whole lot less work gets done. Don't forget whoever replaces the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, either.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    How would you suggest to reward people who strive for more?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - asveikau 3y ago
      First with an understanding that your opinions are subjective and that you will evaluate people incorrectly. Or more simply, with humility. Second, I think if you genuinely have a complaint about dead weight it's probably better to hire selectively, cautiously and consciously rather than evaluate staff as sub-par after that point. Yes that's difficult to do especially with the first point, and it won't be perfect either.
- jbverschoor 3y ago
  Amen. very true.. "Processes" are for factories. Diluting is good for factories, cogs. For some type of 'creationary' work, it's also fine.
- leandot 3y ago
  I agree that there is typically a "superstar", but it's rarely the ones that believe they are a superstar. Often times the so-called "superstar adds so much abstraction and complexity to a product that it feels only they can deal with it, because the rest of the team can't and does not want to deal with it. Work piles up and moves very slowly and it feels the "superstar" is the only one who does the job. Then superstar burns out, quits and leaves the "mediocre" team to deal with the mess. For me a "superstar" is a friendly capable coder, who simplifies, teaches and learns in a feedback loop. They are indeed very rare.
- tacheiordache 3y ago
  Why are superstars seeking employment in corporations though?
  - ayewo 3y ago
    Those outsized salaries [1] are pretty hard to resist once you know you are skilled enough to scale their interview process. 1: https://www.levels.fyi/2023/?level=Principal%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/2023/?level=Principal%20Engineer
- tesdinger 3y ago
  Employees can have phases of high and low productivity, tasks they struggle with and other tasks they blaze through. The article and most of the comments oversimplify things.
- deleted 3y ago
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- ochoseis 3y ago
  > I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC. I have often wondered about this myself, and believe there's some nuance to acknowledge: - Yes, it is absolutely the case that individuals often carry teams. It does sometimes feel like they're subsidizing others' salaries. - There's an old adage in advertising that goes: we know 50% of our budget is wasted on ineffective ads, we just don't know which 50%. The same probably holds true for organizations allocating wages. - People go through different phases of their lives, where they can devote more or less energy to work. This fact may lend credence to a compensation structure that's based on bonuses and equity versus salary. Flat salary bands seem to discourage meritocracy without this adjustment. - Organizations themselves are also dynamic. Consider a small org seeded by a prolific worker. They make the org successful, so the org grows and necessarily dilutes the talent (i.e. reversion to the mean). - Does an organization have an incentive to "slow down" it's most prolific workers so everyone else can keep up? Conversely, should they develop a culture that speeds everyone else up? - Should / do prolific workers self-select into higher-performance organizations, e.g. after getting fed up being a big fish in a small pond? - Team dynamics are undeniable; consider two prolific workers with different styles clashing. I personally would love to work on a team of superstars who mesh, and can capture disproportionate value relative to large, slow, mediocre orgs. The hard part is finding one and keeping it together.
colund 3y ago
Jobs talks about this in https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE. I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who do, understand and care are more valuable than those who only focus on process and politics. Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO
  - signatoremo 3y ago
    > but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
    - FullyFunctional 3y ago
      Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
      - jen20 3y ago
        The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.
        3y ago
kristianp 3y ago
> For example, I once rated all my employees as “superior,” and for good reason: They were the most productive team in the plant. > HR kicked my evaluations back and said I needed to distribute my evaluations more “fairly.” > “Fairly,” of course, meant “bell curve.” > That caused a few outstanding employees to be undervalued and, as a result, under-rewarded. So instead of bell curve, they should be using power law distribution.
neilv 3y ago
> For example, I once rated all my employees as "superior," and for good reason: They were the most productive team in the plant. HR kicked my evaluations back and said I needed to distribute my evaluations more "fairly." "Fairly," of course, meant "bell curve." That caused a few outstanding employees to be undervalued and, as a result, under-rewarded. Since pay was tied to evaluation ratings, they didn't get the raises they deserved. Or the opportunities. If you're ever in this management situation, you can try working the problem up the chain. (At least your own immediate manager, or possibly up and sideways, if you're empowered to do that.) One of the times I did something like that, for a peer who was undervalued, and who'd confided how upset they were at the runaround they were getting. The person who could fix the situation was an exec 2-3 levels up. Since I was allowed to interface throughout the company on some things, I went and explained the situation to the exec, and something about the impact of this person. The exec agreed, and quickly unblocked HR and management to fix it.
- orthoxerox 3y ago
  > you can try working the problem up the chain Not just can, but must. That's the whole point of the team having a manager, to have someone defend them up there. When shit starts raining from above, you don't garnish it with platitudes to "weaken the impact" and pass it to your subordinates, you do your damn best to fight it.
josho 3y ago
A lot of words, but not much substance. Sure we should surround ourselves with superstars and reward them appropriately, but very few people can consistently hire superstars. Absent reliable way to surround ourselves with superstars we rely on process to lift the average for everyone.
freetanga 3y ago
But one could argue that the person he chose to be his successor was more of a process person, rather than content, no? Just thinking out loud, not trying to be smarty pants, but on the other hand people that pontificate every musing from Steve Jobs feel a bit… uneducated to me. Publications such as inc feel geared towards people that consider themselves to understand technology because they are Apple power users. Bit like claiming to be specialist in slaughterhouses just because you eat 3 burgers per day.
thesumofall 3y ago
Why would we see a 80/20 distribution when most human abilities are distributed on a bell curve? I don’t think we really have the tools to reliably measure performance, because performance can mean so many things in so many different contexts. And yes, this can include “process.” The referred McKinsey study talks about politics. Is success in democratic politics really defined by content or by your ability to build a majority around certain ideas that may or may not be your own? Or: should we really dismiss the success of Toyota’s Lean Mgmt at its time which was all about process? My experience is that having “process top performers” sprinkled into a typical team can make all the difference. They ensure that the team can apply its abilities to the right topics in the right sequence avoiding costly detours or entire failures. Or how often do teams deliver output but somewhere along the lines forgot to ask what the initial objectives were actually all about? Once more: process I’m not downplaying the relevance of content, but I’m simply arguing that performance is much more nuanced and diverse than just being good at content
- winrid 3y ago
  Because ability does not mean desire to work :P
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  I hesitate to write this, but I think a counterbalance is needed. In software development, there are things you can measure. For example, you can put a new starter on a big pile of bugs and say “get through these”. You can measure throughput of work tasks, or story points, or lines of code. Can people game this stuff? Yes, but managers can be the check on such things (and have managers of their own). I know someone that works in a sales oriented profession and who manages a large number of people. Their company is ruthless, you get only a couple of weeks to demonstrate you can hit the targets, and after that maybe a couple of weeks of grace after the hard talking to. Less than 50% of new hires make it through probation. Staff that survive all have the same attributes: excellent sales ability and focused determination. It also allows in a high percentage of narcissistic bastards though. I don’t like the idea, but I wonder if a similar metric based probation would achieve the same in this industry. If you want people who can pump out quality content at a higher than average rate, set the bar high and cull ruthlessly during probation.
gieksosz 3y ago
If you yourself feel like an under appreciated superstar this kind of article will surely resonate with you (it is HN after all). I personally find the premise unlikely, without good process you cannot get a larger group of people to do anything consistently.
- duxup 3y ago
  I think the idea here is folks get too enamored with / focused on the process and not the content or product result. Not that you don’t need process.
  - bart_spoon 3y ago
    Ok but who is actually saying the content/product result isn’t important? Seems like a strawman.
    - duxup 3y ago
      I’ve definitely worked with companies that as Steve described where the process(es) get most of the focus and not the content. If the content is not good, the only tool some managers seem to have is process.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- Sateeshm 3y ago
  Yes. Can't really scale well without good process. And it's flat out unrealistic for a large org to hire only superstars. You're gonna have a ton of open positions for years.
  - Sammi 3y ago
    "Can't really scale well without good process" Tell that to almost all Y Combinator unicorns. They're all famous for internal chaos.
starky 3y ago
I like the comparison of content over process. In my experience a small team full of highly skilled engineers that are motivated to get stuff done don't need much process because they will do the right thing. But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. Nothing drives me crazier than working with people that are solely focused on process (and reporting), than considering the process in the context of getting the job done properly and efficiently.
- kevmo314 3y ago
  > But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Doesn't the growth and the adoption of those that don't have the skill handicap everyone else? I've seen quite a few teams kneecap themselves this way by essentially hiring and growing: the team would've been, net-output-wise, more effective staying as a small team and not hiring.
  - starky 3y ago
    Capitalism assumes a company will always be growing. If you are stagnant or shrinking your company is "failing". If your company is growing, you either need to hire more people to produce more product (lest your competitor jump in and meet your customers needs), or your high performing team will get burnt out trying to do more and more. If your company is stagnant or shrinking, the high performers will have options to do something that has a better future or is more exciting. The small high-performing team is a fleeting state that will eventually be infiltrated by the average performer. Ideally you recognize when this is happening, implement the required processes and push through it to come out the other side as a slightly less efficient team that still gets more done because there is enough personnel to make up for the efficiency loss.
  - HumblyTossed 3y ago
    > But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Because that team got stuck with all the work.
ksec 3y ago
Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. It is also strange this being brought up now in 2024. Because from 2014 to 2021 or 2022, the only sentiment allowed was every employees are roughly equal. There are no high performer. No such thing as 10x programmers etc.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. This seems not true. I suspect one of many things Jobs and Cook have in common many tech leaders lack is "taste", a refined ability to curate well.
- NickC25 3y ago
  >Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. I have a feeling that's partially due to how much money a lot of those people (and Apple shareholders) have made under Cook's leadership. The growth has been nothing short of incredible. IIRC Apple shares have grown like 8x or 9x under him (when accounting for inflation). That said, Apple products no longer really have that magic that they had under Jobs (IMO). That could be because they focus now on processes and operations much more than creative technologies. Besides the watch (which was a natural continuation/evolution after the creation of the iPhone), I can't really think of projects created and developed under Cook that are game-changers or come from left field. Process people are great in times where you need to focus on doing the same thing, day in day out...or improve on those same things. In other words, operational execution. However, don't ever trust a process person to do any creative or abstract thinking - it's impossible for them. They have tremendous value for certain types of companies at certain key phases of growth. They are "how" people, not "why" people...and certainly not "what if" people.
  - Golden_Wind123 3y ago
    The counterpoint is that we don't need a new gimmick every year, and the companies that do chase new gimmicks (like Samsung and Xiaomi) do so at the expense of overall fit and finish. However the magic really isn't gone. The Apple Pencil is a nice invention whose whole purpose is for creative endeavors. Gradual refinement isn't a bad thing either. While this isn't a new invention, it definitely feels like magic to wake up, take my M1 Air everywhere I go, and not have to charge it again until I go to bed (even in 2024, I doubt I could do the same with a Dell XPS). The extra benefit is I have no gimmicky touch screen or never used 2in1 hinges to deal with as well.
Agingcoder 3y ago
I tend to think that large corporation are optimized to run things as usual, not make new ones, unlike a startup. Hence the obsession with process, and why it somehow works.
- xpe 3y ago
  Your comment prompted me to consider the ratio between two kinds of information: (a) that which already exists and (b) has yet to be created. By "information" I'm hand-waving around concepts such as code, organizational hierarchy, processes, lessons learned, sales pipelines, industry connections, brand awareness, etc. I will toss out some claims: the human mind, operating in the context of an organization with more stuff that already exists, will largely "anchor" on what is known. In an organization, people share common knowledge -- and people know this about each other. It shapes how they interact and what they think is worth doing and trying. So, to put a finer point on it: To what degree will existing information provide a productive jumping off point for what needs to be done? To the extent my simplifications above capture the core dynamic -- it would perhaps explain a lot: (a) why some pivots feel incredibly hard, while others feel easy; (b) why some teams evolve fluently while others struggle to modernize; (c) why some cash cows transition to adjacent profitable opportunities while others languish; (d) why the idea of "skunk works" is so compelling when rapid innovation is needed
UberFly 3y ago
"Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" is of course dumb in the grand scheme of things, but the fusion reactor of progress really is in the youth.
SeanLuke 3y ago
> In fact, I remember folks screaming at me that it would take five years to engineer a mouse, and it would cost $300 to build. I finally got fed up and went outside and found David Kelly Design... and in 90 days we had a mouse we could build for $15 that was phenomenally reliable. That was a fib. I recall that first Mac mouse had two little (maybe 3mm diameter?) tabs underneath to support it, and they quickly wore away resulting in the mouse largely being unusable without gluing something to the bottom to stabilize it.
hulitu 3y ago
[flagged]
amelius 3y ago
Sounds very similar to what Linus Torvalds once said: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
kbos87 3y ago
Jobs can be completely right about the importance of what he calls “content”, but his aversion to “process” strikes me as short sighted. Where his philosophy usually seems to break down (when others try to apply it) is positioning those two things at odds with each other. You absolutely need both once you reach a certain scale. You also need to ensure they don’t conflict with one another.
- Terretta 3y ago
  > Jobs can be completely right about the importance of what he calls “content”, but his aversion to “process” strikes me as short sighted. Imagine if he wasn't so short sighted the value of the firm he could have created over the long term. PS. I think you're also right, in that I don't see any aversion to process in Jobs, I see an aversion to contentless process people. Jobs loved a quality process.
tahnyall 3y ago
It takes processes to deliver content. It takes content to have a reason to have something to deliver. One employee type isn't better than the other. Jobs was arrogant and the sole reason why I've never bought an Apple product.
scotty79 3y ago
How to professionally say, I only like peons who get s#it done. Don't care how.
throwaway892238 3y ago
The best employees focus on both. You know what makes a great chef? Mise en place, technique, and taste. Organization, preparation, skills, and that indelible knowledge of what looks and tastes good and why. The best chefs don't focus "on process" or "on content", they have to do both, or the dishes will either be inconsistent or mediocre.
jslakro 3y ago
This discussion brings again that polemic statement about those 10x engineers https://1x.engineer/ https://1x.engineer/
inaprovaline 3y ago
Unfortunately those employees are the minority. So yeah in an ideal world this is correct, in the real world that’s not possible as the avg dev needs direction and be guided hand in hand.
- oriel 3y ago
  Ive found that I work this way often enough in the professional world, the problem for me is when management/leadership decides to average the devs' treatment and i get micromanaged despite delivering early and at or beyond scope/requirements. In recent times, this has gotten to the point that I stop delivering early, and end up spending more time 'validating' scope/requirements than actually doing the work... simply due to the overhead of having my time minced by someone else's "best practice" beliefs.
asrael_io 3y ago
I guess you can't win them all even focusing on content... coughs Apple Maps coughs.
tamimio 3y ago
>According to the Apple co-founder, the best employees are also a pain in the butt to manage. Said to me by every single manager, for the reasons of not following a faulty process (a one that I even suggested to fix) or attending the usual silly and useless meetings and always thought it’s a “me-problem” for being “anti-authority” despite over delivering every requirement with a very happy clients we had in a very short period of time, I’m glad someone somewhere agreed with me for once, nice article. The question is, how do you communicate that in the hiring process to eliminate any potential management style that will cause a headache for both of you later, do you just say I’m pain to manage?
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  I guess you say you’re focused on product / driven by delivering value to customers. And in interviews you would want some realistic examples of scenarios where you would want to go one way and you think the kind of manager you dislike would prefer the other way. You can hopefully pose those as questions to better understand how processes work at the company. The problem is the questions need to not have an obvious right answer (you want to avoid ‘used car salesman mentality’ of telling you what they think you want to hear). Or you can just ask about working style/process in general.
- tarruda 3y ago
  Instead of being a 10x engineer, dial down your performance to match the rest of the team. Then, use the extra time/energy to work on side projects that make you happy.
- xiphias2 3y ago
  You probably don't (yet) have the power to fix the process, so it's better to learn the game of getting promoted first. Also you wrote that you suggested a change in the process, not that it was accepted.
HellDunkel 3y ago
I just got very nostalgic reading/watching this and i usually dont. Great „content“ seems to be getting rarer as companies grow bigger. Last decade was especially bad in this regard.
lulznews 3y ago
Yet again, Steve was right.
theknocker 3y ago
[dead]

393 points by jey 3y ago

Ostensibly (2006)

Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC. Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output. Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star. Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.” Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there. A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity. The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.” You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star. That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.

anonreeeeplor 3y ago
[flagged]
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  If you count negative value developers I can totally believe in a 10x one. It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers. Realistically, they would be very uncommon, and odds are that your small company has 0 of them. Of the developers I know that are actual superstars when compared to average developers, they have zero problem displaying their value and make upwards of 7 figures. All of them are aged 40+ too. So, yeah, I don't have a problem with the concept. I just think it gets misapplied.
  - robocat 3y ago
    > It's just been my experience that most people labelled superstars are negative value developers. Who labelled them? The self-labelled are often crappy. The last superstar I worked with seemed like a Cro-Magnon developer. He used outdated tech, didn't understand many modern dev techniques. However he was extremely productive (he was very very good at concentrating on necessary outcomes and ignoring make work). His value was _far_ more than 10x the average developer. He certainly didn't seem to be valuable. Despite his serious faults he produced gold. He was wildly undervalued by other developers. Keep your eyes open - some superstars are invisible. This especially holds in other soft areas like marketing.
    - walteweiss 3y ago
      Somehow I imagine a dev who works in vim (or emacs if you please), does not multitask like crazy, and read books instead of social networks or even hacker news. For some reason he doesn’t know git. Or no, not git. He despises docker. That’s who I imagined.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Well, if you have developers with negative value, and a 10x developer... 10x a negative is even more negative.
p-e-w 3y ago
Another reason why today's corporations love teams and flat hierarchies is because they turn "responsibility" into a post-modern concept that fluidly adapts to mean everything or nothing. One day the boss is the boss, the next day nobody is accountable for anything, and decisions are really just the magical synergy of team dynamics.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- baazaa 3y ago
  The notion of 'culture' does this. It's a meaningless term. No-one ever says 'we fixed the business culture but the company still isn't delivering', because the culture is always inferred from the results. So as a concept it has no explanatory power whatsoever; it only obfuscates, providing a convenient cover for incompetent managers who can say dumb things like 'culture is hard to change'. I work in the public service where accountability has been transformed from a concrete thing (who is responsible for this?) to a 'value'. So the org chart is set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, the processes are set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, but if you point this out managers will retort that it doesn't matter, because what's really important is that everyone personally commits to the value of accountability which in turn will create a culture of accountability. They've replaced performance reviews with workers writing about how much they embrace accountability (of course the absence of genuine reviews helps ensure no-one can be held accountable for poor performance). I'm increasingly of the opinion that any manager who talks at length about culture is a moron. It's a fuzzy catch-all that can be invoked to explain anything without understanding anything, of great value to the modern manager who typically understands nothing.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  So called flat hierarchies also mean that the ones that have the real power can never be truly challenged. It is like climbing the hill and then cutting the rope to ensure nobody else can do it. I've seem this a lot in companies adopting agile. That was always a cabal that had all the real power and the benefits than come with it, but suddenly because of "self-organizing", "flat hierarchy", there was no more any more or less formal path for ascending in the organization. During the first years of the scrum frenzy, the figure of the tech lead almost disappeared in a lot of companies.
billy99k 3y ago
"Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star." This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I admit I was sometimes carried. In creative work this is bound to happen. All people firing on all cylinders and coordinating well is a rarity in creative work. It might work in a kitchen or sailing boat though.
  - chii 3y ago
    There's several types of "carrying". You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff. This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them. The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same. This is the type i admire and want to work with.
    - gthink 3y ago
      That's a very succint description of the arrogant person and the one whom everyone mislabels as arrogant.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ye. "Super stars" are often just people that stampede the other devs. Like, working together is so inefficient in bigger teams that someone let loose will appear very productive, but he is slowing down everyone else.
    - 3y ago
1over137 3y ago
>That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently. Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?
glitchc 3y ago
Actually, that's how the world works most of the time. Superstars also know it and are used to it from early childhood. They are expected to carry the load and equally importantly, the team is expected to listen to them. It works like this in all walks of life, because simply put, human beings are not equal in ability. Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves. Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  That makes sense until you consider that the world (and any team) is "sprinkled" with a lot more narcissists and know-it-alls than geniuses!
  - bornfreddy 3y ago
    It still makes sense. The group that listens to these people instead of real superstars (assuming it has any) is at disadvantage.
    - anonreeeeplor 3y ago
      If I mentioned the company, and you would recognize it, you would understand the catastrophic non performance of this company for a decade. All the old management are still in place despite several ceo changes and it has become the poster child for failed big company. you can even read the glass door reviews. Thousands of posts say the same thing I am saying: The bad people gang up on the good people and that’s why I left.
      - bornfreddy 3y ago
        You misunderstood me - I agree with GP, I'm just pointing out that the GGP's comment still holds. The company is at a disadvantage because of that. But yes, it is difficult to change company culture.
walteweiss 3y ago
Have you ever tried freelancing or having your own company? I never worked in corporations and honestly cannot see myself ever there, considering the money I’d been making freelancing will never be paid to me by any company in the world if they’d just hire me.
fxtentacle 3y ago
That's why I incorporated a tiny company. Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.
- mettamage 3y ago
  I wonder if you ask them about this discrepancy and how they view it. Personally, I find it weird, but wonder how they'd justify the 1.5x expense.
  - cyberpunk 3y ago
    Contractors can be billed to a project, it’s much easier to pass with the finance dept than justifying why one new hire should get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets.
    - chii 3y ago
      > get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets. some enterprising manager realizes this, makes up a new job title (that sound important) to justify the 4x salary, and thus lead to job title inflation as other people sees such a title earning high.
    - pydry 3y ago
      It's justifying why the new hire gets more than their manager that is really hard. It's also easier to book a high fixed cost than a high ongoing cost.
    - FullyFunctional 3y ago
      Contractors are easier to hire and much easier to fire than permanent employees. I've had both good and absolutely terrible experience with QoR of contractors, but IMO the biggest problem is the loss of institutional knowledge when the contract ends. No amount of reports makes up for the warm body in the room that can say, "actually, the reason for this is ...".
quickthrower2 3y ago
Corporations that win tend to have bought themselves a moat and therefore profit to play with akin to a stipend to spend on staff. The people controlling that spend need more than anything else to look competent in their job of managing it, and so they need to work by numbers and follow safe trends. Whatever will keep them in their high paid jobs. Teasing out superstars and giving them free reign is probably not what they are incentivized to do.
mediumsmart 3y ago
What does it mean “dragging a division of 30 people”? That you need to hire 29 instances of the worst and least talented garbage to push just one lonely little sad superman?
icedchai 3y ago
I’ve seen this many times. Only exception was an early stage startup where they really only hired extremely solid folks. Larger or even small but very hierarchical companies have been full of mediocre performers.
015a 3y ago
One strong argument (maybe the only one) for the concept of controlling superstar players is the reality that they are going to leave, eventually; maybe for a better job, maybe retirement, maybe they get hit by a bus. If your output is entirely dependent on a superstar, it inevitably won't be durable against their departure; one way to look at corporations is through the lens of efficiency maximizers, but another equally valid way of thinking about them is through the lens of durability maximizers. The day-to-day actions of most people inside a corporation is far better pattern-matched toward Survivability, not Efficiency. Take any company, and grade it (personally!) on both "how ideologically driven is their mission" and "how productive are they"; eight times out of ten it'll correlate. New companies like OpenAI ("we're inventing machine intelligence"; strong ideology/mission); extremely productive. Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, extremely strong, important mission, extremely productive. Some smaller companies like 37Signals, very ideologically/personality driven, very productive. There's even a few big tech companies left, like Cloudflare, that have strong, coherent mission drive ("Building A Better Internet") and have productivity to match it. One counter-example (and why its, like, eight out of ten): Microsoft. No one has any clue what Microsoft's mission is. That product factory still churns out more new stuff than anyone on the west coast. Those two paragraphs are 100% connected, because roughly the only way to mitigate (not eliminate) the risk of superstars leaving is high, coherent mission drive. "High" means "its clear, its communicated, its meaningful" and "coherent" means "its practiced, its demonstrated, its genuine". Compensation is another way, but the problems with compensation are (1) you will lose the compensation fight with competitors eventually, (2) it selects for actors that aren't interested in anything except compensation, and (3) it breeds complacency/retirement without simultaneous high+coherent mission drive (Nvidia's problem right now). Oxide [1] is an interesting case-study in mitigating some negative impacts of high compensation; "Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location." It just comes down to: Poor Leadership. If the product is boring, if leadership can't coherently communicate mission, direction, value, etc; superstars aren't going to join or stay for very long. Everything else is window dressing. In the absence of that, the most effective way to maintain continuity of operations is normalization and "the bell curve". Also: If you find yourself believing "well, some companies just don't operate in an area where high mission drive is even possible, not every company is on the bleeding edge of AI CryptoTech", just stop. I don't care what you're doing; building a high, coherent mission is always possible. Amazon's mission is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. That's a freakin awesome mission that would resonate with a ton of superstars, and its a mission that every damn company could have, if their leadership chooses it and is high quality enough to live it. [1] https://oxide.computer/careers https://oxide.computer/careers
yodsanklai 3y ago
> That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently. In my "big tech company", there's a thorough (and I think overall fair) evaluation process, and a very high performer can earn a significant amount of money, e.g. 10x the salary of a junior. People are also strongly incentized to deliver through bonuses and stock refresher. I'm not denying that what you describe exists in some (most?) companies, but there are tons of companies out there, and it's also up to employees to do their homework and find places that suits their values and ambitions. They do exist!
- scarface_74 3y ago
  A junior at BigTech averages around $170K. Are you really saying a high performer can make $1.7 million in compensation a year? I’m sure there are a very few that do.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    Sure, but there are very few high performers.
  - yodsanklai 3y ago
    Look at Google [1] and Meta [2], this seems to be in the ballpark. There are people with such high salaries, but they are very few and more than just high-performers. [1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  Ok, seriously curious - how does this evaluation process look like, at least in broad strokes? I haven't yet seen one that would make incentives aligned, but you got my hopes up. :)
- asveikau 3y ago
  My experience with those big companies and those tough but allegedly fair review processes is that management has no idea who is actually doing the work, and disproportionately compensates people they like on a personal level, unfairly. The bias reenforces itself when the "top performers" are preferentially assigned prestigious work that can look good on the next review. You can tell who the stupidest people in the organization are by the faith they have in the fairness and appropriateness of the review system.
ken47 3y ago
I think this varies by corporation, but large corporations at their root have a desire to treat their employees as cogs, because that is the simplest system for them to implement. It is on the employees to make it clear that they are not cogs, which is why politics tends to be a much bigger factor in such companies. If your corporation is not compensating you enough to deal with the additional headache of politics, I'd try working for a smaller company.
ozim 3y ago
Corporations are legal entities to be composition of worker ants to achieve far bigger goals than single „rock star” ever can. Idea is that they will outlive any human life or it would be possible to detach from any single person. There is of course cost attached of not being fully efficient, but that is irrelevant in bigger scale.
conradev 3y ago
Your zero sum outlook assumes that everyone does the same job, when the primary point of a convening an organization is combining different specializations and dividing labor accordingly.
mamp 3y ago
I agree with your assessment. The real challenge is how can organisations best leverage super stars to achieve great things. It's difficult because managers have to be smart and confident, and the super star can't be allowed to undermine others. The high prevalence of insecure managers and arrogant super stars makes this hard to do.
saagarjha 3y ago
Interestingly, every time I see this argument brought up the people who do so seem to count themselves as part of either the average or superstar bucket ;)
ak_111 3y ago
You never saw it go differently but it must be in many organisation. I can't imagine you can sustain the technical excellence over decades in places like Nvidia, Apple, Nintendo, ... without having a very robust process of protecting high-performance deeply technical people from wider organisational politics.
jimnotgym 3y ago
This all makes sense for knowledge workers, but what about the rest of the world? In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office. Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up. This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?
- hef19898 3y ago
  This hero worshippong always puzzles me. All real world examples, from certified sport super stars to actual rock stars, show us that the proverbial employee rockstar is a myth. No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them. A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon. Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.
  - thereisnospork 3y ago
    >Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad. The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.
    - hef19898 3y ago
      I didn't say anything about salaries, did I? Which team so do you think would do better: - Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs - the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys What do you think?
huijzer 3y ago
Customers want consistency. That’s why management turns people into a reliable system where anyone can quit without affecting the outcome of the system. Just like engineers think about software as a system, business people think about companies as a system. McDonalds is the prime example of this. If you enter one of the stores, it doesn’t matter whether John or Dave is in that day. The burger will be the same. Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.
asveikau 3y ago
This seems like something between a conspiracy theory and your own ego going unchecked. I observed something like this, or at least I thought I did. With many more years of reflection, and there were hints along the way as it happened in realtime, I came to realize that the contribution of those I had written off as non-performers and dead weight was actually higher than I had estimated and difficult to actually quantify. My hope for you is that you one day reach similar epiphanies. Because your attitude that some are much better than others and need to be compensated out of proportion is quite toxic. Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  My personal theory is that the most important person at a company, the one most responsible for the company's success, isn't the president or CEO. It's not the star contributor or the one who writes the most lines of code. It's whoever makes the coffee. Because without the coffee, a whole lot less work gets done. Don't forget whoever replaces the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, either.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  How would you suggest to reward people who strive for more?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - asveikau 3y ago
    First with an understanding that your opinions are subjective and that you will evaluate people incorrectly. Or more simply, with humility. Second, I think if you genuinely have a complaint about dead weight it's probably better to hire selectively, cautiously and consciously rather than evaluate staff as sub-par after that point. Yes that's difficult to do especially with the first point, and it won't be perfect either.
jbverschoor 3y ago
Amen. very true.. "Processes" are for factories. Diluting is good for factories, cogs. For some type of 'creationary' work, it's also fine.
leandot 3y ago
I agree that there is typically a "superstar", but it's rarely the ones that believe they are a superstar. Often times the so-called "superstar adds so much abstraction and complexity to a product that it feels only they can deal with it, because the rest of the team can't and does not want to deal with it. Work piles up and moves very slowly and it feels the "superstar" is the only one who does the job. Then superstar burns out, quits and leaves the "mediocre" team to deal with the mess. For me a "superstar" is a friendly capable coder, who simplifies, teaches and learns in a feedback loop. They are indeed very rare.
tacheiordache 3y ago
Why are superstars seeking employment in corporations though?
- ayewo 3y ago
  Those outsized salaries [1] are pretty hard to resist once you know you are skilled enough to scale their interview process. 1: https://www.levels.fyi/2023/?level=Principal%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/2023/?level=Principal%20Engineer
tesdinger 3y ago
Employees can have phases of high and low productivity, tasks they struggle with and other tasks they blaze through. The article and most of the comments oversimplify things.
deleted 3y ago
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ochoseis 3y ago
> I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC. I have often wondered about this myself, and believe there's some nuance to acknowledge: - Yes, it is absolutely the case that individuals often carry teams. It does sometimes feel like they're subsidizing others' salaries. - There's an old adage in advertising that goes: we know 50% of our budget is wasted on ineffective ads, we just don't know which 50%. The same probably holds true for organizations allocating wages. - People go through different phases of their lives, where they can devote more or less energy to work. This fact may lend credence to a compensation structure that's based on bonuses and equity versus salary. Flat salary bands seem to discourage meritocracy without this adjustment. - Organizations themselves are also dynamic. Consider a small org seeded by a prolific worker. They make the org successful, so the org grows and necessarily dilutes the talent (i.e. reversion to the mean). - Does an organization have an incentive to "slow down" it's most prolific workers so everyone else can keep up? Conversely, should they develop a culture that speeds everyone else up? - Should / do prolific workers self-select into higher-performance organizations, e.g. after getting fed up being a big fish in a small pond? - Team dynamics are undeniable; consider two prolific workers with different styles clashing. I personally would love to work on a team of superstars who mesh, and can capture disproportionate value relative to large, slow, mediocre orgs. The hard part is finding one and keeping it together.

colund 3y ago

Jobs talks about this in https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE. I wish more leaders understood this. I interpret his words that people who do, understand and care are more valuable than those who only focus on process and politics. Steve Jobs has great points again. I love to hear him talk about what really matters for success of great tech companies.

smackeyacky 3y ago
Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO
- signatoremo 3y ago
  > but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, OS X)
  - FullyFunctional 3y ago
    Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.
    - jen20 3y ago
      The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.
      - 3y ago

kristianp 3y ago

> For example, I once rated all my employees as “superior,” and for good reason: They were the most productive team in the plant. > HR kicked my evaluations back and said I needed to distribute my evaluations more “fairly.” > “Fairly,” of course, meant “bell curve.” > That caused a few outstanding employees to be undervalued and, as a result, under-rewarded. So instead of bell curve, they should be using power law distribution.

neilv 3y ago

> For example, I once rated all my employees as "superior," and for good reason: They were the most productive team in the plant. HR kicked my evaluations back and said I needed to distribute my evaluations more "fairly." "Fairly," of course, meant "bell curve." That caused a few outstanding employees to be undervalued and, as a result, under-rewarded. Since pay was tied to evaluation ratings, they didn't get the raises they deserved. Or the opportunities. If you're ever in this management situation, you can try working the problem up the chain. (At least your own immediate manager, or possibly up and sideways, if you're empowered to do that.) One of the times I did something like that, for a peer who was undervalued, and who'd confided how upset they were at the runaround they were getting. The person who could fix the situation was an exec 2-3 levels up. Since I was allowed to interface throughout the company on some things, I went and explained the situation to the exec, and something about the impact of this person. The exec agreed, and quickly unblocked HR and management to fix it.

orthoxerox 3y ago
> you can try working the problem up the chain Not just can, but must. That's the whole point of the team having a manager, to have someone defend them up there. When shit starts raining from above, you don't garnish it with platitudes to "weaken the impact" and pass it to your subordinates, you do your damn best to fight it.

josho 3y ago

A lot of words, but not much substance. Sure we should surround ourselves with superstars and reward them appropriately, but very few people can consistently hire superstars. Absent reliable way to surround ourselves with superstars we rely on process to lift the average for everyone.

freetanga 3y ago

But one could argue that the person he chose to be his successor was more of a process person, rather than content, no? Just thinking out loud, not trying to be smarty pants, but on the other hand people that pontificate every musing from Steve Jobs feel a bit… uneducated to me. Publications such as inc feel geared towards people that consider themselves to understand technology because they are Apple power users. Bit like claiming to be specialist in slaughterhouses just because you eat 3 burgers per day.

thesumofall 3y ago

Why would we see a 80/20 distribution when most human abilities are distributed on a bell curve? I don’t think we really have the tools to reliably measure performance, because performance can mean so many things in so many different contexts. And yes, this can include “process.” The referred McKinsey study talks about politics. Is success in democratic politics really defined by content or by your ability to build a majority around certain ideas that may or may not be your own? Or: should we really dismiss the success of Toyota’s Lean Mgmt at its time which was all about process? My experience is that having “process top performers” sprinkled into a typical team can make all the difference. They ensure that the team can apply its abilities to the right topics in the right sequence avoiding costly detours or entire failures. Or how often do teams deliver output but somewhere along the lines forgot to ask what the initial objectives were actually all about? Once more: process I’m not downplaying the relevance of content, but I’m simply arguing that performance is much more nuanced and diverse than just being good at content

winrid 3y ago
Because ability does not mean desire to work :P
lll-o-lll 3y ago
I hesitate to write this, but I think a counterbalance is needed. In software development, there are things you can measure. For example, you can put a new starter on a big pile of bugs and say “get through these”. You can measure throughput of work tasks, or story points, or lines of code. Can people game this stuff? Yes, but managers can be the check on such things (and have managers of their own). I know someone that works in a sales oriented profession and who manages a large number of people. Their company is ruthless, you get only a couple of weeks to demonstrate you can hit the targets, and after that maybe a couple of weeks of grace after the hard talking to. Less than 50% of new hires make it through probation. Staff that survive all have the same attributes: excellent sales ability and focused determination. It also allows in a high percentage of narcissistic bastards though. I don’t like the idea, but I wonder if a similar metric based probation would achieve the same in this industry. If you want people who can pump out quality content at a higher than average rate, set the bar high and cull ruthlessly during probation.

gieksosz 3y ago

If you yourself feel like an under appreciated superstar this kind of article will surely resonate with you (it is HN after all). I personally find the premise unlikely, without good process you cannot get a larger group of people to do anything consistently.

duxup 3y ago
I think the idea here is folks get too enamored with / focused on the process and not the content or product result. Not that you don’t need process.
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  Ok but who is actually saying the content/product result isn’t important? Seems like a strawman.
  - duxup 3y ago
    I’ve definitely worked with companies that as Steve described where the process(es) get most of the focus and not the content. If the content is not good, the only tool some managers seem to have is process.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Sateeshm 3y ago
Yes. Can't really scale well without good process. And it's flat out unrealistic for a large org to hire only superstars. You're gonna have a ton of open positions for years.
- Sammi 3y ago
  "Can't really scale well without good process" Tell that to almost all Y Combinator unicorns. They're all famous for internal chaos.

starky 3y ago

I like the comparison of content over process. In my experience a small team full of highly skilled engineers that are motivated to get stuff done don't need much process because they will do the right thing. But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. Nothing drives me crazier than working with people that are solely focused on process (and reporting), than considering the process in the context of getting the job done properly and efficiently.

kevmo314 3y ago
> But once the team gets to a size where that isn't possible, you have to implement and enforce process in order to make sure that those who don't have that skill can be effective at their jobs. But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Doesn't the growth and the adoption of those that don't have the skill handicap everyone else? I've seen quite a few teams kneecap themselves this way by essentially hiring and growing: the team would've been, net-output-wise, more effective staying as a small team and not hiring.
- starky 3y ago
  Capitalism assumes a company will always be growing. If you are stagnant or shrinking your company is "failing". If your company is growing, you either need to hire more people to produce more product (lest your competitor jump in and meet your customers needs), or your high performing team will get burnt out trying to do more and more. If your company is stagnant or shrinking, the high performers will have options to do something that has a better future or is more exciting. The small high-performing team is a fleeting state that will eventually be infiltrated by the average performer. Ideally you recognize when this is happening, implement the required processes and push through it to come out the other side as a slightly less efficient team that still gets more done because there is enough personnel to make up for the efficiency loss.
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  > But why did the team need to grow to that size if they were highly effective before that? Because that team got stuck with all the work.

ksec 3y ago

Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. It is also strange this being brought up now in 2024. Because from 2014 to 2021 or 2022, the only sentiment allowed was every employees are roughly equal. There are no high performer. No such thing as 10x programmers etc.

Terretta 3y ago
> Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. This seems not true. I suspect one of many things Jobs and Cook have in common many tech leaders lack is "taste", a refined ability to curate well.
NickC25 3y ago
>Except Tim Cook's Apple focuses much more on process and forget about the content. I have a feeling that's partially due to how much money a lot of those people (and Apple shareholders) have made under Cook's leadership. The growth has been nothing short of incredible. IIRC Apple shares have grown like 8x or 9x under him (when accounting for inflation). That said, Apple products no longer really have that magic that they had under Jobs (IMO). That could be because they focus now on processes and operations much more than creative technologies. Besides the watch (which was a natural continuation/evolution after the creation of the iPhone), I can't really think of projects created and developed under Cook that are game-changers or come from left field. Process people are great in times where you need to focus on doing the same thing, day in day out...or improve on those same things. In other words, operational execution. However, don't ever trust a process person to do any creative or abstract thinking - it's impossible for them. They have tremendous value for certain types of companies at certain key phases of growth. They are "how" people, not "why" people...and certainly not "what if" people.
- Golden_Wind123 3y ago
  The counterpoint is that we don't need a new gimmick every year, and the companies that do chase new gimmicks (like Samsung and Xiaomi) do so at the expense of overall fit and finish. However the magic really isn't gone. The Apple Pencil is a nice invention whose whole purpose is for creative endeavors. Gradual refinement isn't a bad thing either. While this isn't a new invention, it definitely feels like magic to wake up, take my M1 Air everywhere I go, and not have to charge it again until I go to bed (even in 2024, I doubt I could do the same with a Dell XPS). The extra benefit is I have no gimmicky touch screen or never used 2in1 hinges to deal with as well.

Agingcoder 3y ago

I tend to think that large corporation are optimized to run things as usual, not make new ones, unlike a startup. Hence the obsession with process, and why it somehow works.

xpe 3y ago
Your comment prompted me to consider the ratio between two kinds of information: (a) that which already exists and (b) has yet to be created. By "information" I'm hand-waving around concepts such as code, organizational hierarchy, processes, lessons learned, sales pipelines, industry connections, brand awareness, etc. I will toss out some claims: the human mind, operating in the context of an organization with more stuff that already exists, will largely "anchor" on what is known. In an organization, people share common knowledge -- and people know this about each other. It shapes how they interact and what they think is worth doing and trying. So, to put a finer point on it: To what degree will existing information provide a productive jumping off point for what needs to be done? To the extent my simplifications above capture the core dynamic -- it would perhaps explain a lot: (a) why some pivots feel incredibly hard, while others feel easy; (b) why some teams evolve fluently while others struggle to modernize; (c) why some cash cows transition to adjacent profitable opportunities while others languish; (d) why the idea of "skunk works" is so compelling when rapid innovation is needed

UberFly 3y ago

"Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty" is of course dumb in the grand scheme of things, but the fusion reactor of progress really is in the youth.

SeanLuke 3y ago

> In fact, I remember folks screaming at me that it would take five years to engineer a mouse, and it would cost $300 to build. I finally got fed up and went outside and found David Kelly Design... and in 90 days we had a mouse we could build for $15 that was phenomenally reliable. That was a fib. I recall that first Mac mouse had two little (maybe 3mm diameter?) tabs underneath to support it, and they quickly wore away resulting in the mouse largely being unusable without gluing something to the bottom to stabilize it.

hulitu 3y ago

[flagged]

amelius 3y ago

Sounds very similar to what Linus Torvalds once said: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."

kbos87 3y ago

Jobs can be completely right about the importance of what he calls “content”, but his aversion to “process” strikes me as short sighted. Where his philosophy usually seems to break down (when others try to apply it) is positioning those two things at odds with each other. You absolutely need both once you reach a certain scale. You also need to ensure they don’t conflict with one another.

Terretta 3y ago
> Jobs can be completely right about the importance of what he calls “content”, but his aversion to “process” strikes me as short sighted. Imagine if he wasn't so short sighted the value of the firm he could have created over the long term. PS. I think you're also right, in that I don't see any aversion to process in Jobs, I see an aversion to contentless process people. Jobs loved a quality process.

tahnyall 3y ago

It takes processes to deliver content. It takes content to have a reason to have something to deliver. One employee type isn't better than the other. Jobs was arrogant and the sole reason why I've never bought an Apple product.

scotty79 3y ago

How to professionally say, I only like peons who get s#it done. Don't care how.

throwaway892238 3y ago

The best employees focus on both. You know what makes a great chef? Mise en place, technique, and taste. Organization, preparation, skills, and that indelible knowledge of what looks and tastes good and why. The best chefs don't focus "on process" or "on content", they have to do both, or the dishes will either be inconsistent or mediocre.

jslakro 3y ago

This discussion brings again that polemic statement about those 10x engineers https://1x.engineer/ https://1x.engineer/

inaprovaline 3y ago

Unfortunately those employees are the minority. So yeah in an ideal world this is correct, in the real world that’s not possible as the avg dev needs direction and be guided hand in hand.

oriel 3y ago
Ive found that I work this way often enough in the professional world, the problem for me is when management/leadership decides to average the devs' treatment and i get micromanaged despite delivering early and at or beyond scope/requirements. In recent times, this has gotten to the point that I stop delivering early, and end up spending more time 'validating' scope/requirements than actually doing the work... simply due to the overhead of having my time minced by someone else's "best practice" beliefs.

asrael_io 3y ago

I guess you can't win them all even focusing on content... coughs Apple Maps coughs.

tamimio 3y ago

>According to the Apple co-founder, the best employees are also a pain in the butt to manage. Said to me by every single manager, for the reasons of not following a faulty process (a one that I even suggested to fix) or attending the usual silly and useless meetings and always thought it’s a “me-problem” for being “anti-authority” despite over delivering every requirement with a very happy clients we had in a very short period of time, I’m glad someone somewhere agreed with me for once, nice article. The question is, how do you communicate that in the hiring process to eliminate any potential management style that will cause a headache for both of you later, do you just say I’m pain to manage?

dan-robertson 3y ago
I guess you say you’re focused on product / driven by delivering value to customers. And in interviews you would want some realistic examples of scenarios where you would want to go one way and you think the kind of manager you dislike would prefer the other way. You can hopefully pose those as questions to better understand how processes work at the company. The problem is the questions need to not have an obvious right answer (you want to avoid ‘used car salesman mentality’ of telling you what they think you want to hear). Or you can just ask about working style/process in general.
tarruda 3y ago
Instead of being a 10x engineer, dial down your performance to match the rest of the team. Then, use the extra time/energy to work on side projects that make you happy.
xiphias2 3y ago
You probably don't (yet) have the power to fix the process, so it's better to learn the game of getting promoted first. Also you wrote that you suggested a change in the process, not that it was accepted.

HellDunkel 3y ago

I just got very nostalgic reading/watching this and i usually dont. Great „content“ seems to be getting rarer as companies grow bigger. Last decade was especially bad in this regard.

lulznews 3y ago

Yet again, Steve was right.

theknocker 3y ago

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