7 ms·

'Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective.' This.

by seivan 13y ago

nostrademons 13y ago
It's not quite that - it's that the organizational structure prevents middle-managers from acting on their knowledge even if they do recognize talent. Imagine that you are responsible for a department of people, all of whom need to work together to accomplish a big job. Assume that talent is normally distributed - maybe you have 1 superstar and 1 idiot, 10 high performers and 10 laggards, and 100 average developers. Also assume that the boundaries between categories are fuzzy - it's not that there's 1 superstar who absolutely stands out, it's that there are 2-3 people who are really good, and one is obviously better to you but that isn't apparent to everyone else, and another 20 or so people are just a bit behind them. What do you do? If you preference your best programmer, give him the pick of assignments and a lot of latitude to choose projects, you will demotivate all the people who are just below him. Ironically, a lot of michaelochurch's past comments are examples of this - his perspective on the "Real Googler line", and even the grandparent comment, is what things look like for someone who is talented and high-performing and yet right below the line. These folks become bitter, demotivated, subversive, and ultimately toxic to the organization. Moreover, you destroy the effectiveness of your superstars as well. To accomplish anything in a large organization, you need cooperation from your peers. When your peers resent your special treatment or want to sabotage your rise, you won't get this. So the only way to succeed as a superstar in a large organization is to act very subtly and bring a lot of people with you, which usually means keeping your more radical ideas to yourself and only saying things that can be heard. (Which, really, is how it should be - think of how unpleasant it is to work in an environment with a "golden kid" who's always running around with the latest technologies, not answerable to anyone else, and yet has management's favor.) This is also why getting rid of laggards is far more important for organizational health than hiring superstars. If you populate an organization full of folks who understand compilers, or understand immutability, or can work with multiple languages, or who understand design patterns, then those techniques become part of the general culture that the whole eng organization can use. If you lack that critical mass, any superstars that understand why those concepts are important will not have the freedom to use those techniques because of the political issues above. There's very good evidence that the middle-managers know exactly who their star performers are. When they quit to found their own company, who do they call? You often have groups of programmers that have worked together through multiple companies, and as soon as you hire one the whole group comes on board within a year. But within a company, the constraints of organizational politics prevent them from favoritism, which is probably how it should be.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  You make a really strong point. I think the problem you described above is why, in truth, closed allocation tech companies are destined to fail. Closed/open allocation is a continuum in reality, but the more closed a technology company is, the quicker it rots. The "Real Googler Line" concept (and, as you know, I was only at Google for half a year and have no insight into what the place is like now) is the recognition that, above a certain level of recognized merit, people should be trusted to allocate their time and energies. As you said, people just below the trust thermocline where it goes from open to closed allocation (on whom the company relies to perform the most thankless, ugliest tasks) get resentful. You don't have a solution until you lower that trust thermocline down to the people who aren't capable of doing useful work, who you don't want to retain anyway. The only conclusion I can reach is that a closed-allocation tech company doesn't work. I realize that open allocation isn't right for all industries, but in software, it seems to have minimal downside, incredible upside, and no reasonable alternative. So, I agree with you. One shouldn't fix a tech company by elevating a couple top performers. (They'll get lonely.) One should go to full open allocation, and then those political issues go away.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    I don't think open allocation works either once you get past Dunbar's Number. Instead of making politics go away, it makes it worse. All the political considerations that are out in the open when you're managing a formal org structure become hidden in the backroom deals of who wants to work with who else and how they want to go about doing it. Here's another observation for you: there is a system where there is no org chart and nobody telling anybody else what to work on. That system is the startup ecosystem. And the end result of that system is what you term "VC-istan": some players become more powerful than others, and they freely choose who they want to associate with based on reputation, or how well their personalities mesh, or pattern-matching on previous successes, or who they went to college with. The only "solution" I could come up with is that there is no solution. If you give people agency and freedom of association, you will eventually run into situations where their freedom to act impinges on someone else's freedom to act, and it is impossible to let both of them work on what they wish without forcing one or the other to make tradeoffs. Or, alternatively, they could both choose to work alone, in which case it is impossible to build anything larger than what one person can do by himself. Once you see that tradeoff, it's possible to make choices that stake out various parts of that space, eg. another thread currently on HN [1] describes how your options are management, niche development, or consulting as you get older. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373301

'Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective.' This.

by seivan 13y ago

'Companies like Yahoo have talent, but can't recognize it at the bottom because the middle-management filter is so defective.' This.

nostrademons 13y ago

It's not quite that - it's that the organizational structure prevents middle-managers from acting on their knowledge even if they do recognize talent. Imagine that you are responsible for a department of people, all of whom need to work together to accomplish a big job. Assume that talent is normally distributed - maybe you have 1 superstar and 1 idiot, 10 high performers and 10 laggards, and 100 average developers. Also assume that the boundaries between categories are fuzzy - it's not that there's 1 superstar who absolutely stands out, it's that there are 2-3 people who are really good, and one is obviously better to you but that isn't apparent to everyone else, and another 20 or so people are just a bit behind them. What do you do? If you preference your best programmer, give him the pick of assignments and a lot of latitude to choose projects, you will demotivate all the people who are just below him. Ironically, a lot of michaelochurch's past comments are examples of this - his perspective on the "Real Googler line", and even the grandparent comment, is what things look like for someone who is talented and high-performing and yet right below the line. These folks become bitter, demotivated, subversive, and ultimately toxic to the organization. Moreover, you destroy the effectiveness of your superstars as well. To accomplish anything in a large organization, you need cooperation from your peers. When your peers resent your special treatment or want to sabotage your rise, you won't get this. So the only way to succeed as a superstar in a large organization is to act very subtly and bring a lot of people with you, which usually means keeping your more radical ideas to yourself and only saying things that can be heard. (Which, really, is how it should be - think of how unpleasant it is to work in an environment with a "golden kid" who's always running around with the latest technologies, not answerable to anyone else, and yet has management's favor.) This is also why getting rid of laggards is far more important for organizational health than hiring superstars. If you populate an organization full of folks who understand compilers, or understand immutability, or can work with multiple languages, or who understand design patterns, then those techniques become part of the general culture that the whole eng organization can use. If you lack that critical mass, any superstars that understand why those concepts are important will not have the freedom to use those techniques because of the political issues above. There's very good evidence that the middle-managers know exactly who their star performers are. When they quit to found their own company, who do they call? You often have groups of programmers that have worked together through multiple companies, and as soon as you hire one the whole group comes on board within a year. But within a company, the constraints of organizational politics prevent them from favoritism, which is probably how it should be.

michaelochurch 13y ago
You make a really strong point. I think the problem you described above is why, in truth, closed allocation tech companies are destined to fail. Closed/open allocation is a continuum in reality, but the more closed a technology company is, the quicker it rots. The "Real Googler Line" concept (and, as you know, I was only at Google for half a year and have no insight into what the place is like now) is the recognition that, above a certain level of recognized merit, people should be trusted to allocate their time and energies. As you said, people just below the trust thermocline where it goes from open to closed allocation (on whom the company relies to perform the most thankless, ugliest tasks) get resentful. You don't have a solution until you lower that trust thermocline down to the people who aren't capable of doing useful work, who you don't want to retain anyway. The only conclusion I can reach is that a closed-allocation tech company doesn't work. I realize that open allocation isn't right for all industries, but in software, it seems to have minimal downside, incredible upside, and no reasonable alternative. So, I agree with you. One shouldn't fix a tech company by elevating a couple top performers. (They'll get lonely.) One should go to full open allocation, and then those political issues go away.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  I don't think open allocation works either once you get past Dunbar's Number. Instead of making politics go away, it makes it worse. All the political considerations that are out in the open when you're managing a formal org structure become hidden in the backroom deals of who wants to work with who else and how they want to go about doing it. Here's another observation for you: there is a system where there is no org chart and nobody telling anybody else what to work on. That system is the startup ecosystem. And the end result of that system is what you term "VC-istan": some players become more powerful than others, and they freely choose who they want to associate with based on reputation, or how well their personalities mesh, or pattern-matching on previous successes, or who they went to college with. The only "solution" I could come up with is that there is no solution. If you give people agency and freedom of association, you will eventually run into situations where their freedom to act impinges on someone else's freedom to act, and it is impossible to let both of them work on what they wish without forcing one or the other to make tradeoffs. Or, alternatively, they could both choose to work alone, in which case it is impossible to build anything larger than what one person can do by himself. Once you see that tradeoff, it's possible to make choices that stake out various parts of that space, eg. another thread currently on HN [1] describes how your options are management, niche development, or consulting as you get older. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373301