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This story made me think. Until now I had the impression that mediocrity at large corporations is inevitable no matter how many smart people they employ, simply

This story made me think. Until now I had the impression that mediocrity at large corporations is inevitable no matter how many smart people they employ, simply due to the size of the corporation. For every talented, competent employee they have 10 average or below-average employees. Even at Google, even (and especially) at Microsoft. Competent people cannot choose who to work with so whatever extra they do is lost in the mediocrity that surrounds them. After reading this article I have realized that even at large corporations if you make isolated and largely idependent small teams of highly competent people that can select their members themselves, you can create "startup" bubbles inside the organization that can deliver outstanding results. Maybe this is the way to go when growing large, from a medium-sized enterprise to a large corporation?

philwelch 17y ago
It's not a new concept. Look up Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works.
- bliving 17y ago
  And the Macintosh project at Apple; complete with pirate flags!
- ramchip 17y ago
  And, IMHO even more importantly, Semco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler
roc 17y ago
If you can sufficiently insulate a group from the corporation in general, sure, you can do better than corporate mediocrity. For a while. But that's harder and harder to do. Particularly for decent stretches of time. Consider: it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team. They aren't incentivized to ship good software, but to ship on schedule. And should avoidance be impossible, they absolutely will point corporate HR at any and every aspect of that strong team, to break-up, slow-down or demoralize them. Similarly, with higher-up management. They'll need certain projects to be treated with kid gloves. So they'll scheme and conspire to either defeat the team and ruin its effectiveness or defeat the process, so that the team's effectiveness is rendered moot. It's the perverted reward structure in large corporations that causes most of their problems. There's no lack of people trying to fix those problems. But any solution (including this one) will ultimately be defeated so long as that reward structure remains.
- nostrademons 17y ago
  Big businesses often avoid that by giving separate profit & loss responsibility to each division. That way, each individual group competes on the marketplace, and incompetent groups can't hide by breaking up competent ones. It's an open question how to adapt this to "infrastructure" groups that are shared by the whole organization, which may explain why there're so many horror stories about corporate IT and HR. I guess technically QA is also an infrastructure group, so it's surprising the Black Team survived for so long, but I guess the improvements they made were visible enough that they had senior management's protection.
  - roc 17y ago
    I think the Black Team's longevity had more to do with the corporate reality of its time. Corporations in the 60s and 70s still valued investment that provided benefits over the long term. So shipping quality was still important. Corporations today are worried only about the next quarter, or what things will look like maybe twelve to eighteen months down the line. But certainly no further than when the options vest and management exits. And that's why divisions don't help. Because defeating the process to ship crap today has a better effect on this and next quarter's P&L, versus increased spending testing/refining the project for no real increase in revenue in the short term. Down the line, when product quality would become known and helping the product sell better than it would otherwise, those responsible for making the decisions will likely be gone. (They'll definitely have planned on being gone by then.)
    - DougBTX 17y ago
      it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team So shipping quality was still important. I'm largely in agreement. This line from the start of the article stood out: Customers do not pay for defective products. Now, you really don't want to be the manager who has customers refusing to pay due to bugs. If the Black Team can spot any problems well in advance of the deadline, all the better. However, if customers are happy to pay for stuff that doesn't work (eg, where the people who make buying decisions don't talk to the people who will be made to use the software - quite common is my impression) then sure, stay a hundred miles away from the Black Team.
pasbesoin 17y ago
One problem is when external forces bring in incompetent management. Being part of such a team may be a great experience, but you are always at the mercy of higher ups. Your one real point of leverage is to walk out the door. If the people managing you don't respect what you bring to the table, you lose even this. And if they don't understand it, which is what often happens with "interchangeable" management, they are unlikely to respect it. Then, reflect that there is the potential for this disconnect at each level of management. Start counting the levels that exist in your organization. If you are smart, you will develop an informal network of contacts/relationships throughout your organization. And keep your resume up to date. (I think that smart people develop such a network not only or even primarily out of a calculated decision to manage their career, but because they find interesting what other people know and do and struggle with and solve, and helping them.) Perhaps this is one reason social skills (of a certain sort) tend to predominate in large organizations. Given the situation, they become the most essential tools to a career. Also, regarding social equanimity, a large part of corporate life is "not rocking the boat". At lower ranks, this can imply a strong uniformity of treatment. Your increase will be between 0% and 4%, regardless, because those are the absolute limits that have been chosen. If someone were to receive 10%, there would be a lot of jealousy and unrest. The only way to larger increases is promotion. Promotion changes one's duties. Ergo, certain duties will never be compensated beyond "industry standards". The social structure caps their compensation and so, minus the individual who 'self-sacrifices', their effectiveness. And this is, in part, where your "average or below-average" coworkers come from. Management won't sweeten the pot, even if, as the posted story implies, going after the top of the talent pool produces far greater returns than the additional investment. I guess this comment is kind of thrown together. Large social structures tend to enforce norms and drift towards a lowest common denominator. Exceptions occur, but over time, they are fighting the tide.
- lallysingh 17y ago
  I've had some good managers and some bad ones. The difference for me has been whether they add-to or reduce my set of concerns. A bad one will make you aware of every microissue their boss has to worry about, and makes you code in some terrible things in order to please them. A good one acts as a firewall between their boss and their subordinates. Bad ideas from above are pushed back (as much as they can), lots of independent (and usually fairly random) requirements are combined into something logical, and my resulting problem set is something reasonable to create, test, and maintain. A boss with programming experience will be able to negotiate a deliverable that's internally consistent enough to make for a good product. They do some of the up-front thinking to reduce the problem down before it's even given to me. A nontechnical boss just sees a spreadsheet of checkboxes that we have to complete. They're like a simple IO controller: send requests, wait for completion.
arockwell 17y ago
I think the important part is to allow these groups to be self-selecting. In other words, the smartest people should gravitate towards each other if they are allowed to. For a really interesting take on how to do this take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Cul... I couldn't find a good source for how many employees they have, but its in the thousands, so they have been able to make this work on a large scale.
tom_b 17y ago
It's a mistake to think that corporate mediocrity follows from employee mediocrity. On the contrary, a significant amount of bad software is made to work by the efforts of a large number of rather smart people. A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline. These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes. Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.
thaumaturgy 17y ago
Did you read the same article I did? This had little to do with competence! The team was successful because it grouped together some people who actually enjoyed their job. Individually, they were only slightly better at it than their peers; as a group of "like-minded individuals" (quoted from the article), they spent much more energy collaborating on ways to improve their software testing process. "Like-minded" is only tangentially related to intelligence or competence or any of the other traits that arrogant people like to ascribe to themselves. It's really about people that have similar priorities and styles and work well together.

philwelch 17y ago

It's not a new concept. Look up Kelly Johnson and the Lockheed Skunk Works.

bliving 17y ago
And the Macintosh project at Apple; complete with pirate flags!
ramchip 17y ago
And, IMHO even more importantly, Semco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

roc 17y ago

If you can sufficiently insulate a group from the corporation in general, sure, you can do better than corporate mediocrity. For a while. But that's harder and harder to do. Particularly for decent stretches of time. Consider: it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team. They aren't incentivized to ship good software, but to ship on schedule. And should avoidance be impossible, they absolutely will point corporate HR at any and every aspect of that strong team, to break-up, slow-down or demoralize them. Similarly, with higher-up management. They'll need certain projects to be treated with kid gloves. So they'll scheme and conspire to either defeat the team and ruin its effectiveness or defeat the process, so that the team's effectiveness is rendered moot. It's the perverted reward structure in large corporations that causes most of their problems. There's no lack of people trying to fix those problems. But any solution (including this one) will ultimately be defeated so long as that reward structure remains.

nostrademons 17y ago
Big businesses often avoid that by giving separate profit & loss responsibility to each division. That way, each individual group competes on the marketplace, and incompetent groups can't hide by breaking up competent ones. It's an open question how to adapt this to "infrastructure" groups that are shared by the whole organization, which may explain why there're so many horror stories about corporate IT and HR. I guess technically QA is also an infrastructure group, so it's surprising the Black Team survived for so long, but I guess the improvements they made were visible enough that they had senior management's protection.
- roc 17y ago
  I think the Black Team's longevity had more to do with the corporate reality of its time. Corporations in the 60s and 70s still valued investment that provided benefits over the long term. So shipping quality was still important. Corporations today are worried only about the next quarter, or what things will look like maybe twelve to eighteen months down the line. But certainly no further than when the options vest and management exits. And that's why divisions don't help. Because defeating the process to ship crap today has a better effect on this and next quarter's P&L, versus increased spending testing/refining the project for no real increase in revenue in the short term. Down the line, when product quality would become known and helping the product sell better than it would otherwise, those responsible for making the decisions will likely be gone. (They'll definitely have planned on being gone by then.)
  - DougBTX 17y ago
    it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team So shipping quality was still important. I'm largely in agreement. This line from the start of the article stood out: Customers do not pay for defective products. Now, you really don't want to be the manager who has customers refusing to pay due to bugs. If the Black Team can spot any problems well in advance of the deadline, all the better. However, if customers are happy to pay for stuff that doesn't work (eg, where the people who make buying decisions don't talk to the people who will be made to use the software - quite common is my impression) then sure, stay a hundred miles away from the Black Team.

pasbesoin 17y ago

One problem is when external forces bring in incompetent management. Being part of such a team may be a great experience, but you are always at the mercy of higher ups. Your one real point of leverage is to walk out the door. If the people managing you don't respect what you bring to the table, you lose even this. And if they don't understand it, which is what often happens with "interchangeable" management, they are unlikely to respect it. Then, reflect that there is the potential for this disconnect at each level of management. Start counting the levels that exist in your organization. If you are smart, you will develop an informal network of contacts/relationships throughout your organization. And keep your resume up to date. (I think that smart people develop such a network not only or even primarily out of a calculated decision to manage their career, but because they find interesting what other people know and do and struggle with and solve, and helping them.) Perhaps this is one reason social skills (of a certain sort) tend to predominate in large organizations. Given the situation, they become the most essential tools to a career. Also, regarding social equanimity, a large part of corporate life is "not rocking the boat". At lower ranks, this can imply a strong uniformity of treatment. Your increase will be between 0% and 4%, regardless, because those are the absolute limits that have been chosen. If someone were to receive 10%, there would be a lot of jealousy and unrest. The only way to larger increases is promotion. Promotion changes one's duties. Ergo, certain duties will never be compensated beyond "industry standards". The social structure caps their compensation and so, minus the individual who 'self-sacrifices', their effectiveness. And this is, in part, where your "average or below-average" coworkers come from. Management won't sweeten the pot, even if, as the posted story implies, going after the top of the talent pool produces far greater returns than the additional investment. I guess this comment is kind of thrown together. Large social structures tend to enforce norms and drift towards a lowest common denominator. Exceptions occur, but over time, they are fighting the tide.

lallysingh 17y ago
I've had some good managers and some bad ones. The difference for me has been whether they add-to or reduce my set of concerns. A bad one will make you aware of every microissue their boss has to worry about, and makes you code in some terrible things in order to please them. A good one acts as a firewall between their boss and their subordinates. Bad ideas from above are pushed back (as much as they can), lots of independent (and usually fairly random) requirements are combined into something logical, and my resulting problem set is something reasonable to create, test, and maintain. A boss with programming experience will be able to negotiate a deliverable that's internally consistent enough to make for a good product. They do some of the up-front thinking to reduce the problem down before it's even given to me. A nontechnical boss just sees a spreadsheet of checkboxes that we have to complete. They're like a simple IO controller: send requests, wait for completion.

arockwell 17y ago

I think the important part is to allow these groups to be self-selecting. In other words, the smartest people should gravitate towards each other if they are allowed to. For a really interesting take on how to do this take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Cul... I couldn't find a good source for how many employees they have, but its in the thousands, so they have been able to make this work on a large scale.

tom_b 17y ago

It's a mistake to think that corporate mediocrity follows from employee mediocrity. On the contrary, a significant amount of bad software is made to work by the efforts of a large number of rather smart people. A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline. These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes. Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.

thaumaturgy 17y ago

Did you read the same article I did? This had little to do with competence! The team was successful because it grouped together some people who actually enjoyed their job. Individually, they were only slightly better at it than their peers; as a group of "like-minded individuals" (quoted from the article), they spent much more energy collaborating on ways to improve their software testing process. "Like-minded" is only tangentially related to intelligence or competence or any of the other traits that arrogant people like to ascribe to themselves. It's really about people that have similar priorities and styles and work well together.