20 ms·

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 experien

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
[deleted]
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.

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

[deleted]

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.