6 ms·

Stop Ignoring Your High Performers

79 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

austin-cheney 2y ago
High performance is generally an anti pattern in software. The name of the game, at least historically, is first hiring and Jira task completion second. The only real incentive to become a 10x developer, at least for me, is to use my time for other things. Otherwise, stepping outside the mold just upsets people in the corporate world.
- worstspotgain 2y ago
  I've experienced this. It'd be nice to hear from the counter example here, the 10x developers in meritocratic nests. Mostly so we know where they are.
  - throw4950sh06 2y ago
    Here I am, hired as a team lead, got to a VP of Eng. in 2 years during which I fixed (initiated and led the projects, didn't code myself) many long standing issues with the company's engineering organization and the product itself. I was a director before this job, though at a smaller company. It's a 200-person startup.
  - curtisblaine 2y ago
    I'm kind of an high performer and it's not so simple. The first thing is that you need to flight under the radar most of the time. It doesn't pay to do 10x all the time (and realistically you can't constantly in all facets of your job), you need to do 1.5x most of the time and then do 10x when it's most needed and most clear to everyone that you just saved the day. The second thing is that I never said no to more money. It's a job, your boss and colleagues are people who work with you. Occasionally they can become friends but not automatically and not most of the time.
- jajko 2y ago
  Corporate world ain't the place for 10x devs, that's just a non-primary skill maxed. Primary skill is somewhere around understanding politics and grokking how to please the person evaluating / promoting you. If its about rating from others then same applies to them. Rarely is that directly relevant to quality of engineering output itself. This goes often very directly against innate desire of engineers to do some good creative work so we often struggle to get appreciated, but that's how it is. That's why various degree of sociopathy present naturally helps with above and smart sociopaths comfortably inhibit higher levels of management of such places. I don't use that term as an insult just to be clear, rather personality trait that is not binary but very much endless tones of grey. Triple above if IT is just a cost center to given corporation.
- emmanueloga_ 2y ago
  > High performance is generally an anti pattern in software. Talk about "10X performers" reminds me of the saying "It’s a marathon, not a race." Most people recognize Usain Bolt, but how many people have heard of Eliud Kipchoge? In our field, the "Usains"—the flashy 10X performers—are hailed as heroes. If you are a "Kipchoge", quietly focusing on a sustainable career, you will probably fly under the radar.
  - InitialBP 2y ago
    Kipchoge is less like "quietly focusing on a sustainable career" and more like "consistently maintaining the highest quality and pace of development and rarely if ever having an off week".
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    > "It’s a marathon, not a race." Rather "it's a crawl, not a marathon". Also, I think the most value a programmer provide is as a maintainer. I blame feature factories led by agile clergy for the perceived drop in commercial software quality in the last 10-15 years. There is no place for maintainance.
    - stickfigure 2y ago
      > I blame feature factories led by agile clergy This is a weird take. The most basic principle of agile is that you start with a tiny kernel of software that does something useful, and then iterate on it. In effect, all agile software development is maintenance.
  - austin-cheney 2y ago
    You and I have very different definitions of 10x developers. 10x developers are just people who can achieve vastly superior performance. Rarely is there any announcement, bragging, or bravado that comes with this. On the contrary most 10x developers tend to want to hide their performance up until they are ready to quit. Its not like they are going to get paid 10x more for over achieving. There is nothing flashy to this. Instead they will be reassigned to other people's problems on top of their own work. So, its best to just keep it to themselves and over achieve as necessary to do less work, because they will get paid the same either way.
- hylaride 2y ago
  > stepping outside the mold just upsets people in the corporate world. This is the crux of the problem for me. How many of us are literally not allowed to work on stuff not on the backlog, which is usually driven by product people. We only deal with the product roadmap and other issues (technical debt, inefficiency, security issues, etc) don’t get resolved unless it somehow impacts the product. If you’re very lucky, you’ll have an actual technical CTO who has the power to say no and allow the developers to remediate issues (one CTO I worked with had to spend enormous political capital to get a single sprint dedicated to upgrading to Java 8 so that the developers could benefit from lambdas - something that for our code base literally cut development time in half due to the way we ingest and process very dynamic ingested data). There must be some law of software engineering that all engineering teams eventually become run like assembly lines where management disallows ground-up thinking. One place I worked finally only implemented a proper security program when a potential customer demanded it, and it was ultimately implemented as a checkmark-based solution to meet the terms of the contract. This meant burning CVE’s more than writing secure code. This was frustrating as management at the time decided microservices were what we needed, but then resulted in a distributed monolith because they weren’t allowed to spend the time on architecture work, tooling to secure communication between services, or even have proper distributed tracing.
  - VHRanger 2y ago
    > There must be some law of software engineering that all engineering teams eventually become run like assembly lines where management disallows ground-up thinking. Its a law of incentives. At some point protecting the existing processes is more important than growing, which implies disruption. At that point all the things mentioned above start
- Muromec 2y ago
  >Otherwise, stepping outside the mold just upsets people in the corporate world. That's not exactly true. What upsets people in the corporate world is telling others that their creative ideas enshrined as a Corporate Policy are wrong and asking to do it the other way. What doesn't upset people in the corporate world is finding a way to further said Policy while at the same time getting yourself a license to some creativity in the ways to implement it.
  - austin-cheney 2y ago
    As a JavaScript developer you live in a world where people are afraid to write software... any software, at all. When I say afraid I mean that word in the very visceral emotional way. It is a culture of extreme Invented Here Syndrome where you add dependencies and if there is not a dependency that already solves a given problem the problem is simply not worth solving. So, you end up with these colossal frameworks, yes that's plural. The developers like to pat themselves on the back for their supreme challenge of conquering the beast to... put text on screen. It's stupid, but it a way it's self-validating because these frameworks are just massive. They provide an API more than 10x larger the standards they replace so that developers don't have to form original opinions or build things. When I say stepping outside the mold I mean not doing any of that stupid shit. As a result of avoiding the stupid I can release products that are possibly 1000x faster to execute, more accessible, dramatically faster to maintain, and so on. One developer that actually knows what they are doing can easily replace an entire development team. If that one developer that knows what they are doing always knows how to implement test automation they can reduce expenses associated by regression around 95-98%. But when you do any of that you have immediately invalidated the existence and imposter nonsense of the other developers like popping a balloon. The natural response is hostility. Fortunately I was able to switch careers and go do something else.
meindnoch 2y ago
Yikes. No, leave me alone. I don't need weekly 1:1 meetings and other stupidity.
- mpweiher 2y ago
  4. Autonomy and Trust One of the quickest ways to disengage a high performer is to micromanage them. These individuals have proven time and again that they are capable, innovative, and reliable.
sklargh 2y ago
Managers and managers of managers, absent a few limited scenarios (vocation, edge case personal finance stuff) your high performers are seeking more comp. No fluff or hallway conversation will make up for that. You’ve got to make their lives decent and win the end of FY comp knifefight. You can safely ignore everything this person wrote.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
  Not ignore, but carefully consider. At certain point, money stops being the only motivator that can be used. Few years ago, I wouldn't be trading money for spending more time with my kid, but now I am willing to make that trade. I guess what I am saying is that thing do differ and while it makes for an easy quip 'pas d'argent pas de suisse'. I mean, it is true in general, but not an absolute truth without exceptions and edge cases. << You’ve got to make their lives decent And this is where we agree. If you can make the performer life better ( not automatically with money ), you got their attention.
  - spunker540 2y ago
    This may be true— but I also think few “high performers” are seeking less responsibility/commitment. They are working hard to be recognized for it, and the recognition ought to be financial in most cases. I totally agree with your sentiment but I think “more free time” is a difficult award in general. Most managers would probably look at most high performers and say “you want more time? Then work less! You are already over performing” it’s somewhat out of their hands how much someone chooses to work, but they can more directly control how much they pay and award via bonuses.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
      I think you are right in terms of an employee class. Anecdotally, my buddy ( I don't see myself as a high performer those past few years ), is going out of his way to make things work, while I kinda drift along. He is definitely more stressed and he should get cash money for it, while it is still an option AND he is not burnt out.
anotherhue 2y ago
High performers tend to get bored with the reality of most development. This usually presents as over-enginerring and a reluctance to do dull but necessary tasks. Over time the risk of them leaving builds and others are reluctant to take on their mantle (complex code, assumed overtime, whatever). I've never been able to hire a high performer with the remit of 'please take over this complex and custom system your predecessor built and walked away from' - such people want to build that stuff themselves and someone else has already had the fun. Businesses want reliability and predictability, your high performance is probably better spent on your hobbies, or your own (ownership >= 10%) businesses. High is relative to other team members so I suspect this is true no matter the baseline skill.
- ozim 2y ago
  I would say it is basically the same on all levels. Devs just want to rebuild everything all the time and most of the time reasons are made up - real reason is they want to make it themselves their way.
  - kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
    > real reason is they want to make it themselves their way. I have a different theory. I think the real reason is that writing code is easier than reading. Literally, it's psychologically more comfortable to write code than to read it.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      Which is why adding tests is a great way to get to understand a codebase.
    - ozim 2y ago
      This is part of it that I agree with. Downside is those devs forget that in 3-6 months of not working on that part will have the same feelings. I work on the same system for 10 years now, I moved to a more dev ops position and don't write that much code, when I pick up some ticket I am really amazed to find out code that I am working on changing for the ticket is something I wrote a year or two years ago and I have no memories of writing that because I was doing thousands other tasks in different places of the system.
goldcd 2y ago
What the article seems to miss is that for every delusional high-performer who's about to be short-changed on reward and recognition, there's an order-of-magnitude more potential high-performers who aware of the lack of reward and recognition, are having a nice relaxing life. Possibly knocking out their work in a couple of hours in the morning and spending the afternoon studying micro-biology to perfect their sourdough pizza crust. i.e. retaining your 10x superstar is important, but are the rest of the team really only capable of 1x? Really? What's the benefit to them of giving 2x? There seems to be some myth that everybody gives every ounce of their potential, out of the goodness of their heart as an employee. I think the reality is that most of us do whatever the role requires, plus anything we happen to enjoy/fixing frustrations.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  This is a really good insight. You also have the effect where the perception of being a 'high performer' might be gamed. E.g. it might be rather trivial to churn out code and be perceived like a high performer, but you are essentially just creating alot more job for everyone else and drag them down. Also, it is easy to do so much stuff that you will be blocked and waiting on other, who seem slow etc. Unless the manager is working along side you he likely wont notice. And these points also happen automatically by itself. But I guess adversial collegues use the concept to game the workplace.
ozim 2y ago
There is also a downside - high performers doing stuff they think is important disconnected from business reality. It goes well when company goals align with high performers goals and as soon as the two diverge it starts being more problem than not. We have lots of articles and voices about CV driven development so that is also there.
- switch007 2y ago
  It's been my experience they're kept in the dark by Product, on purpose. So no wonder when they're bored they just do what they can in their little box, disconnected from the business Very much a "developers do the Jira tickets I create, that's it" kind of mentality in most PMs I've ever met
  - AJRF 2y ago
    Why do you think they are kept in the dark on purpose?
    - betaby 2y ago
      Politics, at least in our company.
- drpossum 2y ago
  If they're off doing things that are disconnected form business reality, how can they be performing at all?
  - Salgat 2y ago
    A good example is fixing massive technical debt on a service that's either rarely touched or wont be around in a few years. The performance required to do this is impressive, but it adds little business value. It's all relative, high technical performance but low business productivity.
    - oxidant 2y ago
yrcyrc 2y ago
Consistently been such a high performer, but being gifted, ADD and on the spectrum made absolutely sure I can’t be politically correct enough to get any form of compensation, approval or recognition commensurate with my achievements. You get used to it I suppose, both a blessing and a curse.
- fifteen1506 2y ago
  Tell me more. I don't really think that isn't possible to learn -- I'm not saying lying, I'm saying adding a second translation layer which allows you to tell the truth in a inclusive way. "Black people are dumb" VS "People with less access to quality education tend to be disproportionately people of color". Then again, I don't live in the States.
  - yrcyrc 2y ago
    I don’t either. Didn’t mean it that way, sure, interesting point. I could learn that translation layer and I surely tried. But so far it’s been pretty unsuccessful to say the least.
    - fifteen1506 2y ago
      That is probably because you are not a Yes-man, not because of DEI policies.
jnurmine 2y ago
"So, what do high performers really want in the workplace? They seek recognition, growth opportunities, and autonomy, but retaining their commitment requires more than just understanding these needs." Or you could pay the high performers more and compensate them better? People are generally not spending their time at work for sheer altruism. There are of course exceptions, but I would say the majority has bills to pay and the uncertain future to consider; people work, not because of self-fulfillment and spiritual growth and whatnot, but because they get money for their efforts. Also, if the work environment is micro-managed, meeting-infested, has arbitrary policies, lacks autonomy, does not recognize people, has near zero growth opportunities, bottom ranks go "WTF?" every time when upper ranks open their mouth, and so on, I doubt people can become high performers to begin with. That is: the work environment has to do something right for high performers to arise at all. So, optimizing the components of a good work environment further might be fine, but if those are already on an OK level, from the point of view of the high performer: what's the point -- what's in it for them?
flkiwi 2y ago
The one flaw I see in the premise of this article is that, very often, high performers are much smarter and more capable than their managers, so expecting managers to recognize the talent and not be threatened by it when they do is unrealistic.
- loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  It’s uncommon but not unrealistic. The old adage “surround yourself with people smarter than you” applies and is a mark of a good manager. Maybe it’s good if the manager is not a clueless MBA and has enough technical expertise to understand what the team is taking about. It should be a manager of manager’s job to identify and replace managers who don’t understand this.
  - flkiwi 2y ago
    Absolutely, and I’ve worked with (and tried to model myself on) people who hire people smarter than they are. If nothing else, management is itself a skill and many highly competent doers have little interest in management. And that’s ok! But I have seen way too many managers-promoting-managers and ignoring doers along the way.
shrubble 2y ago
The saying that “A level management hires A’s , while B’s hire C’s” is true and directly ties into this. The arrogant-yet-incompetent management I have encountered actually makes it difficult for high performers since the mental “box” they want people to fit into and be cogs in the machine, gets exposed as false; the usual way to fix this is to get rid of the problem, by firing the high performers.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  I mean, I don't disagree with you, but it's important to note that high performance is incredibly context dependent, like the same person can be a rockstar at company A and complete garbage at company B. Ultimately, I think if the management has self awareness and clear goals, a lot of this crap can be avoided (but sometimes that means selecting out people who are rocking, because they don't match the system).
ww520 2y ago
Trust is important for high performers. Trusted to get the job done and to make the best decisions.
captain_coffee 2y ago
In the vast majority of cases the answer is more money. Employers will do literally anything besides offering that, even when explicitly told by the top performing employees that they only want more money and nothing else.

79 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

High performance is generally an anti pattern in software. The name of the game, at least historically, is first hiring and Jira task completion second. The only real incentive to become a 10x developer, at least for me, is to use my time for other things. Otherwise, stepping outside the mold just upsets people in the corporate world.

worstspotgain 2y ago
I've experienced this. It'd be nice to hear from the counter example here, the 10x developers in meritocratic nests. Mostly so we know where they are.
- throw4950sh06 2y ago
  Here I am, hired as a team lead, got to a VP of Eng. in 2 years during which I fixed (initiated and led the projects, didn't code myself) many long standing issues with the company's engineering organization and the product itself. I was a director before this job, though at a smaller company. It's a 200-person startup.
- curtisblaine 2y ago
  I'm kind of an high performer and it's not so simple. The first thing is that you need to flight under the radar most of the time. It doesn't pay to do 10x all the time (and realistically you can't constantly in all facets of your job), you need to do 1.5x most of the time and then do 10x when it's most needed and most clear to everyone that you just saved the day. The second thing is that I never said no to more money. It's a job, your boss and colleagues are people who work with you. Occasionally they can become friends but not automatically and not most of the time.
jajko 2y ago
Corporate world ain't the place for 10x devs, that's just a non-primary skill maxed. Primary skill is somewhere around understanding politics and grokking how to please the person evaluating / promoting you. If its about rating from others then same applies to them. Rarely is that directly relevant to quality of engineering output itself. This goes often very directly against innate desire of engineers to do some good creative work so we often struggle to get appreciated, but that's how it is. That's why various degree of sociopathy present naturally helps with above and smart sociopaths comfortably inhibit higher levels of management of such places. I don't use that term as an insult just to be clear, rather personality trait that is not binary but very much endless tones of grey. Triple above if IT is just a cost center to given corporation.
emmanueloga_ 2y ago
> High performance is generally an anti pattern in software. Talk about "10X performers" reminds me of the saying "It’s a marathon, not a race." Most people recognize Usain Bolt, but how many people have heard of Eliud Kipchoge? In our field, the "Usains"—the flashy 10X performers—are hailed as heroes. If you are a "Kipchoge", quietly focusing on a sustainable career, you will probably fly under the radar.
- InitialBP 2y ago
  Kipchoge is less like "quietly focusing on a sustainable career" and more like "consistently maintaining the highest quality and pace of development and rarely if ever having an off week".
- rightbyte 2y ago
  > "It’s a marathon, not a race." Rather "it's a crawl, not a marathon". Also, I think the most value a programmer provide is as a maintainer. I blame feature factories led by agile clergy for the perceived drop in commercial software quality in the last 10-15 years. There is no place for maintainance.
  - stickfigure 2y ago
    > I blame feature factories led by agile clergy This is a weird take. The most basic principle of agile is that you start with a tiny kernel of software that does something useful, and then iterate on it. In effect, all agile software development is maintenance.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  You and I have very different definitions of 10x developers. 10x developers are just people who can achieve vastly superior performance. Rarely is there any announcement, bragging, or bravado that comes with this. On the contrary most 10x developers tend to want to hide their performance up until they are ready to quit. Its not like they are going to get paid 10x more for over achieving. There is nothing flashy to this. Instead they will be reassigned to other people's problems on top of their own work. So, its best to just keep it to themselves and over achieve as necessary to do less work, because they will get paid the same either way.
hylaride 2y ago
> stepping outside the mold just upsets people in the corporate world. This is the crux of the problem for me. How many of us are literally not allowed to work on stuff not on the backlog, which is usually driven by product people. We only deal with the product roadmap and other issues (technical debt, inefficiency, security issues, etc) don’t get resolved unless it somehow impacts the product. If you’re very lucky, you’ll have an actual technical CTO who has the power to say no and allow the developers to remediate issues (one CTO I worked with had to spend enormous political capital to get a single sprint dedicated to upgrading to Java 8 so that the developers could benefit from lambdas - something that for our code base literally cut development time in half due to the way we ingest and process very dynamic ingested data). There must be some law of software engineering that all engineering teams eventually become run like assembly lines where management disallows ground-up thinking. One place I worked finally only implemented a proper security program when a potential customer demanded it, and it was ultimately implemented as a checkmark-based solution to meet the terms of the contract. This meant burning CVE’s more than writing secure code. This was frustrating as management at the time decided microservices were what we needed, but then resulted in a distributed monolith because they weren’t allowed to spend the time on architecture work, tooling to secure communication between services, or even have proper distributed tracing.
- VHRanger 2y ago
  > There must be some law of software engineering that all engineering teams eventually become run like assembly lines where management disallows ground-up thinking. Its a law of incentives. At some point protecting the existing processes is more important than growing, which implies disruption. At that point all the things mentioned above start
Muromec 2y ago
>Otherwise, stepping outside the mold just upsets people in the corporate world. That's not exactly true. What upsets people in the corporate world is telling others that their creative ideas enshrined as a Corporate Policy are wrong and asking to do it the other way. What doesn't upset people in the corporate world is finding a way to further said Policy while at the same time getting yourself a license to some creativity in the ways to implement it.
- austin-cheney 2y ago
  As a JavaScript developer you live in a world where people are afraid to write software... any software, at all. When I say afraid I mean that word in the very visceral emotional way. It is a culture of extreme Invented Here Syndrome where you add dependencies and if there is not a dependency that already solves a given problem the problem is simply not worth solving. So, you end up with these colossal frameworks, yes that's plural. The developers like to pat themselves on the back for their supreme challenge of conquering the beast to... put text on screen. It's stupid, but it a way it's self-validating because these frameworks are just massive. They provide an API more than 10x larger the standards they replace so that developers don't have to form original opinions or build things. When I say stepping outside the mold I mean not doing any of that stupid shit. As a result of avoiding the stupid I can release products that are possibly 1000x faster to execute, more accessible, dramatically faster to maintain, and so on. One developer that actually knows what they are doing can easily replace an entire development team. If that one developer that knows what they are doing always knows how to implement test automation they can reduce expenses associated by regression around 95-98%. But when you do any of that you have immediately invalidated the existence and imposter nonsense of the other developers like popping a balloon. The natural response is hostility. Fortunately I was able to switch careers and go do something else.

meindnoch 2y ago

Yikes. No, leave me alone. I don't need weekly 1:1 meetings and other stupidity.

mpweiher 2y ago
4. Autonomy and Trust One of the quickest ways to disengage a high performer is to micromanage them. These individuals have proven time and again that they are capable, innovative, and reliable.

sklargh 2y ago

Managers and managers of managers, absent a few limited scenarios (vocation, edge case personal finance stuff) your high performers are seeking more comp. No fluff or hallway conversation will make up for that. You’ve got to make their lives decent and win the end of FY comp knifefight. You can safely ignore everything this person wrote.

A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
Not ignore, but carefully consider. At certain point, money stops being the only motivator that can be used. Few years ago, I wouldn't be trading money for spending more time with my kid, but now I am willing to make that trade. I guess what I am saying is that thing do differ and while it makes for an easy quip 'pas d'argent pas de suisse'. I mean, it is true in general, but not an absolute truth without exceptions and edge cases. << You’ve got to make their lives decent And this is where we agree. If you can make the performer life better ( not automatically with money ), you got their attention.
- spunker540 2y ago
  This may be true— but I also think few “high performers” are seeking less responsibility/commitment. They are working hard to be recognized for it, and the recognition ought to be financial in most cases. I totally agree with your sentiment but I think “more free time” is a difficult award in general. Most managers would probably look at most high performers and say “you want more time? Then work less! You are already over performing” it’s somewhat out of their hands how much someone chooses to work, but they can more directly control how much they pay and award via bonuses.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 2y ago
    I think you are right in terms of an employee class. Anecdotally, my buddy ( I don't see myself as a high performer those past few years ), is going out of his way to make things work, while I kinda drift along. He is definitely more stressed and he should get cash money for it, while it is still an option AND he is not burnt out.

anotherhue 2y ago

High performers tend to get bored with the reality of most development. This usually presents as over-enginerring and a reluctance to do dull but necessary tasks. Over time the risk of them leaving builds and others are reluctant to take on their mantle (complex code, assumed overtime, whatever). I've never been able to hire a high performer with the remit of 'please take over this complex and custom system your predecessor built and walked away from' - such people want to build that stuff themselves and someone else has already had the fun. Businesses want reliability and predictability, your high performance is probably better spent on your hobbies, or your own (ownership >= 10%) businesses. High is relative to other team members so I suspect this is true no matter the baseline skill.

ozim 2y ago
I would say it is basically the same on all levels. Devs just want to rebuild everything all the time and most of the time reasons are made up - real reason is they want to make it themselves their way.
- kjrfghslkdjfl 2y ago
  > real reason is they want to make it themselves their way. I have a different theory. I think the real reason is that writing code is easier than reading. Literally, it's psychologically more comfortable to write code than to read it.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    Which is why adding tests is a great way to get to understand a codebase.
  - ozim 2y ago
    This is part of it that I agree with. Downside is those devs forget that in 3-6 months of not working on that part will have the same feelings. I work on the same system for 10 years now, I moved to a more dev ops position and don't write that much code, when I pick up some ticket I am really amazed to find out code that I am working on changing for the ticket is something I wrote a year or two years ago and I have no memories of writing that because I was doing thousands other tasks in different places of the system.

goldcd 2y ago

What the article seems to miss is that for every delusional high-performer who's about to be short-changed on reward and recognition, there's an order-of-magnitude more potential high-performers who aware of the lack of reward and recognition, are having a nice relaxing life. Possibly knocking out their work in a couple of hours in the morning and spending the afternoon studying micro-biology to perfect their sourdough pizza crust. i.e. retaining your 10x superstar is important, but are the rest of the team really only capable of 1x? Really? What's the benefit to them of giving 2x? There seems to be some myth that everybody gives every ounce of their potential, out of the goodness of their heart as an employee. I think the reality is that most of us do whatever the role requires, plus anything we happen to enjoy/fixing frustrations.

rightbyte 2y ago
This is a really good insight. You also have the effect where the perception of being a 'high performer' might be gamed. E.g. it might be rather trivial to churn out code and be perceived like a high performer, but you are essentially just creating alot more job for everyone else and drag them down. Also, it is easy to do so much stuff that you will be blocked and waiting on other, who seem slow etc. Unless the manager is working along side you he likely wont notice. And these points also happen automatically by itself. But I guess adversial collegues use the concept to game the workplace.

ozim 2y ago

There is also a downside - high performers doing stuff they think is important disconnected from business reality. It goes well when company goals align with high performers goals and as soon as the two diverge it starts being more problem than not. We have lots of articles and voices about CV driven development so that is also there.

switch007 2y ago
It's been my experience they're kept in the dark by Product, on purpose. So no wonder when they're bored they just do what they can in their little box, disconnected from the business Very much a "developers do the Jira tickets I create, that's it" kind of mentality in most PMs I've ever met
- AJRF 2y ago
  Why do you think they are kept in the dark on purpose?
  - betaby 2y ago
    Politics, at least in our company.
drpossum 2y ago
If they're off doing things that are disconnected form business reality, how can they be performing at all?
- Salgat 2y ago
  A good example is fixing massive technical debt on a service that's either rarely touched or wont be around in a few years. The performance required to do this is impressive, but it adds little business value. It's all relative, high technical performance but low business productivity.
  - oxidant 2y ago

yrcyrc 2y ago

Consistently been such a high performer, but being gifted, ADD and on the spectrum made absolutely sure I can’t be politically correct enough to get any form of compensation, approval or recognition commensurate with my achievements. You get used to it I suppose, both a blessing and a curse.

fifteen1506 2y ago
Tell me more. I don't really think that isn't possible to learn -- I'm not saying lying, I'm saying adding a second translation layer which allows you to tell the truth in a inclusive way. "Black people are dumb" VS "People with less access to quality education tend to be disproportionately people of color". Then again, I don't live in the States.
- yrcyrc 2y ago
  I don’t either. Didn’t mean it that way, sure, interesting point. I could learn that translation layer and I surely tried. But so far it’s been pretty unsuccessful to say the least.
  - fifteen1506 2y ago
    That is probably because you are not a Yes-man, not because of DEI policies.

jnurmine 2y ago

"So, what do high performers really want in the workplace? They seek recognition, growth opportunities, and autonomy, but retaining their commitment requires more than just understanding these needs." Or you could pay the high performers more and compensate them better? People are generally not spending their time at work for sheer altruism. There are of course exceptions, but I would say the majority has bills to pay and the uncertain future to consider; people work, not because of self-fulfillment and spiritual growth and whatnot, but because they get money for their efforts. Also, if the work environment is micro-managed, meeting-infested, has arbitrary policies, lacks autonomy, does not recognize people, has near zero growth opportunities, bottom ranks go "WTF?" every time when upper ranks open their mouth, and so on, I doubt people can become high performers to begin with. That is: the work environment has to do something right for high performers to arise at all. So, optimizing the components of a good work environment further might be fine, but if those are already on an OK level, from the point of view of the high performer: what's the point -- what's in it for them?

flkiwi 2y ago

The one flaw I see in the premise of this article is that, very often, high performers are much smarter and more capable than their managers, so expecting managers to recognize the talent and not be threatened by it when they do is unrealistic.

loloquwowndueo 2y ago
It’s uncommon but not unrealistic. The old adage “surround yourself with people smarter than you” applies and is a mark of a good manager. Maybe it’s good if the manager is not a clueless MBA and has enough technical expertise to understand what the team is taking about. It should be a manager of manager’s job to identify and replace managers who don’t understand this.
- flkiwi 2y ago
  Absolutely, and I’ve worked with (and tried to model myself on) people who hire people smarter than they are. If nothing else, management is itself a skill and many highly competent doers have little interest in management. And that’s ok! But I have seen way too many managers-promoting-managers and ignoring doers along the way.

shrubble 2y ago

The saying that “A level management hires A’s , while B’s hire C’s” is true and directly ties into this. The arrogant-yet-incompetent management I have encountered actually makes it difficult for high performers since the mental “box” they want people to fit into and be cogs in the machine, gets exposed as false; the usual way to fix this is to get rid of the problem, by firing the high performers.

disgruntledphd2 2y ago
I mean, I don't disagree with you, but it's important to note that high performance is incredibly context dependent, like the same person can be a rockstar at company A and complete garbage at company B. Ultimately, I think if the management has self awareness and clear goals, a lot of this crap can be avoided (but sometimes that means selecting out people who are rocking, because they don't match the system).

ww520 2y ago

Trust is important for high performers. Trusted to get the job done and to make the best decisions.

captain_coffee 2y ago

In the vast majority of cases the answer is more money. Employers will do literally anything besides offering that, even when explicitly told by the top performing employees that they only want more money and nothing else.