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Especially because "One of the most important things that made Microsoft successful was Bill Gates' devotion to hiring the best people. If you hire all A people

Especially because "One of the most important things that made Microsoft successful was Bill Gates' devotion to hiring the best people. If you hire all A people, he said, they'll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they'll hire the C people and then it's all over." (taken from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html)

logfromblammo 11y ago
I have always disagreed with that. Microsoft also used stack ranking, one of the worst management practices from an employee perspective that I know about. It operates on the same principle: arbitrarily execute everyone at the bottom of the perceived bell curve. That leads me to a translation of a quote by Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." The counting method has a greater effect upon the outcome than the actual votes. How you measure the worth of someone may have little relation to the value they can actually provide. If you rank people by how quickly they can move 100m, and subsequently hire Carl Lewis and FloJo to manage Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Mo Greene, Carmelita Jeter, and Tori Bowie, you're going to be disappointed when they try to do the same 5m 20 times, or 100m up a vertical rope, or 100m across the surface of a lake, or 100m while carrying a 50 kg backpack, or 100m across ice and snow, or 100m across a tightrope, or 100m on a flat, straight, level track, at local noon, in June, in the Sonora desert, with only 1 L of water. So that Gates quote sounds to me a bit like begging the question, defining an "A person" as "someone Microsoft ranks well", a "B person" as "someone Microsoft ranks neutrally" and a "C person" as "someone Microsoft ranks poorly". Without establishing the ranking metrics, all he's really saying there is that Microsoft hires people with a good cultural fit for Microsoft. That doesn't make them the best people. It makes them the best people by Microsoft's method of estimation. There really are no 10x or 0.1x developers. The worth of the worker cannot be meaningfully separated from the conditions of the job. Someone who is 10x while working alone on his own side project may be 0.1x on a team using a management-mandated process. You can't really know ahead of time how well someone will do when thrown into your unique variety of bullshit. (And pretending that your company has no bullshit does not make it magically disappear.)

logfromblammo 11y ago

I have always disagreed with that. Microsoft also used stack ranking, one of the worst management practices from an employee perspective that I know about. It operates on the same principle: arbitrarily execute everyone at the bottom of the perceived bell curve. That leads me to a translation of a quote by Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." The counting method has a greater effect upon the outcome than the actual votes. How you measure the worth of someone may have little relation to the value they can actually provide. If you rank people by how quickly they can move 100m, and subsequently hire Carl Lewis and FloJo to manage Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Mo Greene, Carmelita Jeter, and Tori Bowie, you're going to be disappointed when they try to do the same 5m 20 times, or 100m up a vertical rope, or 100m across the surface of a lake, or 100m while carrying a 50 kg backpack, or 100m across ice and snow, or 100m across a tightrope, or 100m on a flat, straight, level track, at local noon, in June, in the Sonora desert, with only 1 L of water. So that Gates quote sounds to me a bit like begging the question, defining an "A person" as "someone Microsoft ranks well", a "B person" as "someone Microsoft ranks neutrally" and a "C person" as "someone Microsoft ranks poorly". Without establishing the ranking metrics, all he's really saying there is that Microsoft hires people with a good cultural fit for Microsoft. That doesn't make them the best people. It makes them the best people by Microsoft's method of estimation. There really are no 10x or 0.1x developers. The worth of the worker cannot be meaningfully separated from the conditions of the job. Someone who is 10x while working alone on his own side project may be 0.1x on a team using a management-mandated process. You can't really know ahead of time how well someone will do when thrown into your unique variety of bullshit. (And pretending that your company has no bullshit does not make it magically disappear.)