4 ms·

And it's not either-or. You can be a 10x worker and be toxic. Sometimes those are the worst to have. You think you need them because they do X, Y, and Z beauti

And it's not either-or. You can be a 10x worker and be toxic. Sometimes those are the worst to have. You think you need them because they do X, Y, and Z beautifully, but in reality they're destroying morale and tanking everybody else's ability to do A-W. It's very, very easy in this situation to try to put a band-aid on things and hunker down, try to encourage the other folks to just give the toxic person a little more space. But it never works, and the longer you drag it out the more the A-team folks who aren't toxic will jump ship.

amyjess 11y ago
Yes, it's much better to hire a team of OK people who will work together as a team than it is to hire a team of superstars who's egos are too big to fit through the door.
- ionforce 11y ago
  Exploring: Is it possible to have a 10x /team/ rather than a 10x individual?
  - jotm 11y ago
    Well, then you're just working for SpaceX :-)
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    Yes. You can even have a team of 1/10 folks who, put together, work at 10x. More counter-intuitively, you can take a 10x team full of folks everybody agrees are brilliant, stick them in other teams, and have the other teams tank and folks in the other teams think those folks are losers. It's a humbling (and enlightening) thing to watch. ADD: A lot of the myth of the 10 or 100x developer is just a really, really capable guy with a supporting team that is able to meet all of their needs and clear all of their obstacles. The team (including our star) is the cool and irreplaceable part, but the "genius" or "boy wonder" gets all the good press.
    - matwood 11y ago
      > ADD: A lot of the myth of the 10 or 100x developer is just a really, really capable guy with a supporting team that is able to meet all of their needs and clear all of their obstacles. The team (including our star) is the cool and irreplaceable part, but the "genius" or "boy wonder" gets all the good press. I would argue this is almost always true especially in todays world of ever increasing software complexity. Building services, handling ops, fixing bugs, high level architecture, low level architecture, front end, back end, etc... are just impossible for a single person to ever be 10x at across the board. It takes a team to deliver software. I look at it a lot like Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 90s. MJ was the 10x player, but without the other hall of famers and all stars on the team they would not have won like they did. The same also goes for the rest of the team.
      - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
        If you ask me, this phenomenon is the reason we see a lot of incredibly successful founders flail at a second startup -- and it's also the reason we see some folks continue to kick ass year after year. The first guys started believing their own press (One wag said that in SV, you either grow into the CEO role or you swell into it). They flipped, then started over -- leaving folks from the previous team spread here or there and not realizing they destroyed the magic. The second bunch just keeps honing a better and better team, moving the team into high positions of leadership. Each team member becomes a CEO, but the team survives (and continues to improve).
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  I have been watching teams form and succeed -- or die -- for a long time. I'm very close to believing that you'd be better off with hiring smart people right off the street who have never worked in IT -- but get along great and truly care and help each other out -- than you would trying to screen out folks who know algorithms and/or data structures and then filter a second time for not being a douchebag. I have seen a lot of average ability teams who had social skills kick ass. I've never seen a team with tremendously smart people without them do so. In fact, I continue to be amazed at the brilliant people I meet sometime whom I wouldn't want bagging groceries for me, much less creating an web application. ADD: If anybody's interested in running an experiment where we create teams basically out of thin air, hit me up. I've been kicking around some ideas in this space for a couple of years or so.
  - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
    Why an experiment? It sounds like a very good pitch for a project services company.
    - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
      I have no personal desire to start or run a project services company, so it's not something I would fund. My interest is from the standpoint of understanding and accelerating how teams perform. (Or don't) Also there's an interesting relationship between the people, the team, and the company. As it turns out, all are important equally, just in different ways. You really need a pre-existing company to do this. Finally, I don't care what anybody tells you, work in this area is experimental. Everybody and their brother has a pet theory and most of it is based on limited/non-existent sample sizes or the conflating a plethora of data with an abundance of understanding. If people were robots, we'd just hire robots.
      - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
        Apologies my HN response time drops when I go on holiday. I was not meaning you should start a "normal" project services company - more that most such companies just grab semi-random contractors and throw them into the latest contract, meaning a company that made experimentation the basis of its allocation may have a both a commercial attraction and greater scale than ordinary lab-scale experiments. Not that I know what you are planning so it's likely to be off target. (Well actually your second sentence suggests taking existing teams in existing company)

amyjess 11y ago

Yes, it's much better to hire a team of OK people who will work together as a team than it is to hire a team of superstars who's egos are too big to fit through the door.

ionforce 11y ago
Exploring: Is it possible to have a 10x /team/ rather than a 10x individual?
- jotm 11y ago
  Well, then you're just working for SpaceX :-)
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Yes. You can even have a team of 1/10 folks who, put together, work at 10x. More counter-intuitively, you can take a 10x team full of folks everybody agrees are brilliant, stick them in other teams, and have the other teams tank and folks in the other teams think those folks are losers. It's a humbling (and enlightening) thing to watch. ADD: A lot of the myth of the 10 or 100x developer is just a really, really capable guy with a supporting team that is able to meet all of their needs and clear all of their obstacles. The team (including our star) is the cool and irreplaceable part, but the "genius" or "boy wonder" gets all the good press.
  - matwood 11y ago
    > ADD: A lot of the myth of the 10 or 100x developer is just a really, really capable guy with a supporting team that is able to meet all of their needs and clear all of their obstacles. The team (including our star) is the cool and irreplaceable part, but the "genius" or "boy wonder" gets all the good press. I would argue this is almost always true especially in todays world of ever increasing software complexity. Building services, handling ops, fixing bugs, high level architecture, low level architecture, front end, back end, etc... are just impossible for a single person to ever be 10x at across the board. It takes a team to deliver software. I look at it a lot like Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 90s. MJ was the 10x player, but without the other hall of famers and all stars on the team they would not have won like they did. The same also goes for the rest of the team.
    - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
      If you ask me, this phenomenon is the reason we see a lot of incredibly successful founders flail at a second startup -- and it's also the reason we see some folks continue to kick ass year after year. The first guys started believing their own press (One wag said that in SV, you either grow into the CEO role or you swell into it). They flipped, then started over -- leaving folks from the previous team spread here or there and not realizing they destroyed the magic. The second bunch just keeps honing a better and better team, moving the team into high positions of leadership. Each team member becomes a CEO, but the team survives (and continues to improve).
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
I have been watching teams form and succeed -- or die -- for a long time. I'm very close to believing that you'd be better off with hiring smart people right off the street who have never worked in IT -- but get along great and truly care and help each other out -- than you would trying to screen out folks who know algorithms and/or data structures and then filter a second time for not being a douchebag. I have seen a lot of average ability teams who had social skills kick ass. I've never seen a team with tremendously smart people without them do so. In fact, I continue to be amazed at the brilliant people I meet sometime whom I wouldn't want bagging groceries for me, much less creating an web application. ADD: If anybody's interested in running an experiment where we create teams basically out of thin air, hit me up. I've been kicking around some ideas in this space for a couple of years or so.
- lifeisstillgood 11y ago
  Why an experiment? It sounds like a very good pitch for a project services company.
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    I have no personal desire to start or run a project services company, so it's not something I would fund. My interest is from the standpoint of understanding and accelerating how teams perform. (Or don't) Also there's an interesting relationship between the people, the team, and the company. As it turns out, all are important equally, just in different ways. You really need a pre-existing company to do this. Finally, I don't care what anybody tells you, work in this area is experimental. Everybody and their brother has a pet theory and most of it is based on limited/non-existent sample sizes or the conflating a plethora of data with an abundance of understanding. If people were robots, we'd just hire robots.
    - lifeisstillgood 11y ago
      Apologies my HN response time drops when I go on holiday. I was not meaning you should start a "normal" project services company - more that most such companies just grab semi-random contractors and throw them into the latest contract, meaning a company that made experimentation the basis of its allocation may have a both a commercial attraction and greater scale than ordinary lab-scale experiments. Not that I know what you are planning so it's likely to be off target. (Well actually your second sentence suggests taking existing teams in existing company)