Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve.
The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist.
This was my experience in (large co).
I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 people yet still being compensated for doing the work of one IC.
Management of that group took the approach “it’s a team effort!” And get the credit for that output.
Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star.
Eventually super star gets fed up and leaves, and gets paid what everyone else gets somewhere else “hoping to be valued.”
Management still win. They get the credit for the super stars work. Frustrated super star leaves. Mediocre management is still there.
A decade later nothing but the WORST and LEAST talented garbage are left. No one remotely talented would ever join that company because it’s a trap - you just get averaged in with mediocrity.
The “averaging the great in with the spectacular” to reduce the relative power of the spectacular is the entire point of “management.”
You have a team of six, pretend the work of the super star is “everyone working together” and attempt to grow your headcount off that super star.
That has been my entire career. Never seen it go differently.
Actually, that's how the world works most of the time. Superstars also know it and are used to it from early childhood. They are expected to carry the load and equally importantly, the team is expected to listen to them. It works like this in all walks of life, because simply put, human beings are not equal in ability.
Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves.
Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.
Superstars are why I don’t try harder and am less engaged. They take all of the interesting ownership and inject themselves into every process and space for communication. I wait for these people to burn out and want to actually be a team member instead of a productivity bully hoarding opportunity for themselves. They want to be the first on everything so they can influence it to be more how they like, the rest of team be damned. They don’t care if the rest of the team feels unmotivated from a lack of ownership, at least they got theirs? I don’t understand the mentality.
How do they get to "take" as an IC.
Every team and individual have their own norms, but some people just take the agency to get shit done. In other words, when there’s work to be done they don’t feel the need to ask permission.
Can't OP do the same then instead of waiting on a team member to burn out . I think OP is barking up the wrong tree because the problem seems that their manager doesn't believe in them or maybe OP doesn't believe in themselves to step up and take responsibility .
I want them to do less and let the team fail instead of personally holding the team up. Our team needs to fail and learn lessons but this individual is so astoundingly good that they can carry us.
"Superstars are why I don’t try harder and am less engaged. They take all of the interesting ownership and inject themselves into every process and space for communication. I wait for these people to burn out and want to actually be a team member instead of a productivity bully hoarding opportunity for themselves."
Are you sure you've got a "superstar" there?
I think the term ought to be reserved for people who truly do a lot of good work, and not the many varieties of people who manage to make it look like they're doing lots of good work. Which absolutely exist, and need terminology to talk about them, and sharing strategies to deal with them is a good thing to do. But while I'm sure there's a non-zero set of people who are both superstars and very good at giving the appearance of doing a lot of work and being very political about it, I doubt there are many. That's a very particular order off the metaphorical menu of attributes.
I would expect a real superstar to be happy to find that you can carry a meaningful portion of the load. There is always more work to do than can be done. Being able to not do some of it allows them to focus somewhere else.
I agree, if they are interjecting themselves into everything and taking all the “cool projects”, they aren’t superstars - they’re supera$$høles.
A real superstar would empower the team with that extra sprinkle of confidence so they can tackle the cool projects and succeed. They should be SWAT, not Mayor.
I’m sorry you feel this way and you should bring this up with your manager.
They truly do a lot of good (great!) work and for quite a few years straight, so much so that the rest of the team atrophies as they continue to fill larger and larger gaps.
Actually, a superstar will welcome and mentor other capable "superstars". She or he will not have patience for one that expects to be taught everything. One thing they understand very well is while everyone won't be at the same level as them, helping other people skill up leaves them space to go do other interesting things as well
So what you have isn't a superstar. That's a jerk who will burn out fast and your management isn't responsive enough.
They are really good at what they do and they've been going strong for years, so I think there will be more waiting necessary. I like to rise to the challenge and this person covers all gaps so there is no pressure which builds.
What happens when rest of the team does not rise to the occasion? You now have a happy but very mediocre team for the task on hand. Decision making is very democratic but seldom happens in time.
I feel you need pace setters but not excessively reward individual heroics.
A very mediocre team that does not rise to the occasion (aka fails at delivering) probably will look bad for management and will be sidesteps (aka outsourced) if not fully replaced.
Because when the "team" undoubtedly fails, it falls on shoulders of the superstar to fix it.
Lowest common denominator. If you happen to work with people who are slower / have less ability than you.. you'd be the "superstar".. Now everybody is just picking their nose... welcome to Shitco. inc.
The type of person you are describing is not what others are talking about.
That makes sense until you consider that the world (and any team) is "sprinkled" with a lot more narcissists and know-it-alls than geniuses!
I personally have known several people. They are not narcissists. They are literally 100x talent. One of them built out a half dozen hit games, doing all the art and programming for one employer which represented half the companies profit.
Then he left, started a 30 person company, got frustrated, quit and built another game entirely from scratch doing all the art direction and sold millions then retired.
One person.
I guess this can varies per company. It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company. After all, “In The Land of The Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.”
This is really common in many European companies. Most developers are doing the bare minimum and it’s common for the department to be carryover by a single guy that is passionate by software development.
My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.
Or they just plain don't care about software engineering and just do bare minimum for salary.
It is extremely hard to be a superstar in a dinosaur company, if we are talking about software development.
The thing to consider is called "technical debt." You will not believe what can be accumulated through years if technical debt is not addressed. And usually it is not properly addressed, of course.
Care to share this person's personal website?
What a rollercoaster of a life.
[Edit: I was trying to make a joke reference but after reviewing the facts, no it doesn't look like the person referenced was Chris Sawyer of Rollercoaster Tycoon fame. He could fit the description though]
I met a small number of exceptional people. Most were very good people, smart and very passioned and that made them very productive. Unfortunately not all of them were positive additions to the team, one was counterproductive as he was creating a lot of tension and conflict.
It still makes sense. The group that listens to these people instead of real superstars (assuming it has any) is at disadvantage.
If I mentioned the company, and you would recognize it, you would understand the catastrophic non performance of this company for a decade.
All the old management are still in place despite several ceo changes and it has become the poster child for failed big company.
you can even read the glass door reviews. Thousands of posts say the same thing I am saying: The bad people gang up on the good people and that’s why I left.
You misunderstood me - I agree with GP, I'm just pointing out that the GGP's comment still holds. The company is at a disadvantage because of that. But yes, it is difficult to change company culture.
Here in Germany, we had a bad experience listening to our superstar Adolf and decided we should try democracy next time. Some parts of.the political party AFD is trying to change that, unsuccessfully, so far.
What the heck are you talking about?
It's been a while since I've seen Godwin's law, and this time by a real German!
If management is listening to the superstar and translating it to the team to support them it is great.
If management expect people to just listen to the superstar directly it’s terrible, as the superstar has no time to do the actual work and is expected to lead instead.
That is the easiest way to kill talent, and strange enough most people are encouraged to go this way to grow within the company.
A long time ago I was the superstar in 3 teams, 2 different companies. In the first one, 25 years ago, the management made me the team lead, it worked well. The second case, 10 years ago, the company was a huge corporation but not yet rotten, my manager put me in charge of the rest of the team went well for time time I was there, when I was moved to another team unexpectedly everything crashed and burned (most of the team left the company). In the last case the management did nothing, it was pretty bad, after a while most people were listening to me because they trusted me, but some (career driven) were constantly sabotaging everyone else and it got worse. It was the same corporation going DIE and the E rule was that everybody is equal at all cost, the dumbest idea was the same value as the best idea and everyone was paid the same. We had no above average people since.
The best thing management can do is to listen to Steve Jobs: "the best managers are the great IC who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because nobody else is going to be able to do as good as jobs as them". [Youtube ID QplyFXgIx7Q].
Yeah this is spot on. My time in engineering has taught me that the world is falling apart, always and forever. There is a relentless decay eating everything around you and it's often only the heroic acts of surprisingly few high-quality people that keep it going to tomorrow.
Those people are rare, perhaps around 0.5-5% of the population or less depending on where you draw the boundaries. But they can be found in all different walks of life. I know one that was a UPS driver for 30 years. Not a remarkable profession, but he is a remarkable guy. School was about the only thing he wasn't a high-performer in with the exception of high-school sports. But he can solve basically any problem. Even those out of his depth, because he knows when something is out of his depth and he also knows who to pull in to consult. He knows EVERYONE and everyone that knows him owes him a favor because he uses his undying energy and hard work to help them all. At work, they begged him to become a manager but he refused the position over and over. But they would screen every new hire through him to see if they were worth keeping. When something would go wrong, they called him. I remember one instance when there was an interruption to the entire local area fuel AND power supply and the warehouse was therefore out of operation because their backup generators didn't have enough fuel. So... they just called him in the middle of the night and by God, he had the problem solved by 4 am that day and still showed up for work. His breadth of skill and knowledge is also incredible, but I'll save the reader some time and omit those stories.
Despite being rare gems of people, you paradoxically seem to run into these people everywhere because they tend to be so prolific and well connected. Effective managers learn to just funnel their problems through these people with enough lead time to keep the whole team operational.
Speaking of the world falling apart and there’s decay all around you, you should try sailing.
The corrosive forces of the ocean combined with what-ever-that-is growing on your bottom hull reminds you it’s a constant battle between human nature and Mother Nature.
It is interesting to see this dynamic playing in music bands, in situations where one person writes the songs, and the others just follow along.
Then the talent gets fed up and leave, leaving a mere "cover band" behind, unable to replicate the magic beyond what an average amateur band could do.
That's why I incorporated a tiny company.
Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.
I wonder if you ask them about this discrepancy and how they view it. Personally, I find it weird, but wonder how they'd justify the 1.5x expense.
Guess it's different over in the states, but my boss said the cost to the company is roughly 2x the salary. This includes taxes (not income tax), pension and such.
So 1.5x would be a steal in comparison.
2x sounds like it includes non-billable employees like assistants, HR, accounting etc. A 100% overhead is probably quite common.
Pure employee costs are more in the 1.2 - 1.3x range (Europe). That is 30% on top of the gross salary for employer taxes, health insurances etc.
I am in Portugal. Here your real wages are tiny compared to the company expenses.
To start: everyone pays 34.75% of mandatory social contribution, even if you are on minimum wage. Government tricks people saying the contribution is "only" 11% but charges the other 23.75% from the employer.
So if a company pays 1000 eur to "you" (remember a chunk goes straight to government and skips you, but they are still spending that to pay you) you get 652.5 euro. Or 65% roughly. And that is only the social contribution part.
The average income tax for a tech worker is around 20%. Thus you get instead 500 euro flat.
Thus a Portuguese company to hire a tech worker would literally spend the double of your taxless wages just to hire you and pay the income taxes and social contribution. Then if you factor all other potential expenses things get even sillier.
So, Portugal is pretty much in my 1.2-1.3 range?
Contractors can be billed to a project, it’s much easier to pass with the finance dept than justifying why one new hire should get 4x what someone else with the same job title gets.
It's justifying why the new hire gets more than their manager that is really hard.
It's also easier to book a high fixed cost than a high ongoing cost.
some enterprising manager realizes this, makes up a new job title (that sound important) to justify the 4x salary, and thus lead to job title inflation as other people sees such a title earning high.
Contractors are easier to hire and much easier to fire than permanent employees. I've had both good and absolutely terrible experience with QoR of contractors, but IMO the biggest problem is the loss of institutional knowledge when the contract ends. No amount of reports makes up for the warm body in the room that can say, "actually, the reason for this is ...".
I show up differently in their accounting ledger, and because investors scrutinise that, management will optimise for it. Instead of employee cost (which is usually tightly controlled) I now show up as an external service next to extortionate cloud bills (where nobody knows or cares what they pay for anyway) somewhere 2 levels deep in COGS. Being the cheapest service provider looks a lot better on paper than being the most expensive employee.
Also depending on country there is tax and social security payments which companies dont have pay when they are buying consulting.
And in Europe consultants are much, much easier to fire (especially if the minimum standard of performance is "more capable than our existing staff" or the problem is for an indeterminate amount of time)
Companies are full of weird cargo cult like that.
Having a ssalary cap on certain positions, but paying top dollar for external consultants doing the same is very very common.
Most companies are status-based, not value-based. The primary goal is to maintain status differentials. Pay is one of many tools used to enforce status hierarchies.
As an external consultant you are - to some extent - outside the hierarchy, so the usual rules don't apply.
When companies get really big and dysunctional they start to treat their customers as if they're the bottom of the hierarchy. Which is how you get all finds of corporate outrages.
Because of lack of benefits, don't have to go through unions to fire ect.
Same reason you pay higher on a short term apartmentlease.
Because it's temporary.
That is, if the company hires you, they hire you (in theory) forever. But if they contract with you, that's usually for the duration of the contract - a few months. A higher rate but for a short time is easier to justify than a slightly lower, but still high, rate forever.
If you don’t mind me asking, what specific area do you specialize in with your consulting work?
I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.
I do any kind of research and software development. But the most profitable tasks tend to be finding a new angle for how you can automate something.
In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment.
Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.
Nice. Your work eliminates jobs and transfers their salary to the business owner! Seems more like bean counting than tech.
Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.
That's a good point, but I would argue that lack of digitalisation is a real bottleneck for industries.
Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand.
Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.
There are only so many PCBs and cupcakes that the world needs. Consolidation displaces competitors and their employees/jobs.
My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.
This is not about consolidation.
The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes.
I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it.
Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with.
Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.
You are correct and I have considered this because in general I, too, dislike the trend of profits being focused on ever fewer owners.
However, what is the better option here?
A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs.
B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs.
My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.
Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more.
Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity.
I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use.
God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.
I wish you a ton of success, we need a lot of streamlining and digitalisation here! I hope you’ll do some good work for the government next as there’s so much red tape and antiquated methods.
So in essence you apply for regular employment and when you get turned down you pitch your consulting service?
On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well, but with kid on the way I am worried I won't be able to find clients...
> On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well...
Not getting paid? Are you trying to break into an industry with an unpaid internship or is this a hack-a-thon side project?
I don't understand how structuring an independent contractor offering will get you paid by the same folks who aren't paying you at the moment.
Doesn't sound like it would solve your issue.
Underpaid, it was unfortunate autocorrect that slipped, sorry. I am dev with 10y of working experience. I considered freelancing before, got onto toptal and similar pages but got no good offers (net money would be better but with incorporation/sole prop. I would lose health and retirement benefits) - the moment they hear where I am from the offer is cut down or passed to someone else...
@fxtentacle - I'm currently planning on starting a consulting company for my area of expertise (data engineering), can I reach out to you and learn the 101 of doing something like this?
I'd say just ask the questions because 1. I don't have all the answers and 2. if it's a group discussion we have a higher chance of learning something new
I am interested also. Would love to tune in and learn. I am desperate.
That’s part of the reason behind hiring consultants - both strategy consultants who are brought in for their subject matter expertise and staff augmentation “consultants”.
On the other hand, I’m more than willing to accept my 35% lower compensation to have a full time job than I know I could make if I went independent.
"Their boss looks down and sees Director managing 30 people and getting amazing result X, where X is 90% the effort of the one super star."
This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.
I admit I was sometimes carried. In creative work this is bound to happen. All people firing on all cylinders and coordinating well is a rarity in creative work. It might work in a kitchen or sailing boat though.
There's several types of "carrying".
You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff.
This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them.
The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same.
This is the type i admire and want to work with.
Been there, done that, it's a career dead-end.
I used to be that person, but the problem is that you’re creating an incentive structure that doesn’t enable the management chain to identify and correct problems. A company should not be standing on the shoulders of a single engineer doing thankless work to prevent catastrophe.
Ye. "Super stars" are often just people that stampede the other devs. Like, working together is so inefficient in bigger teams that someone let loose will appear very productive, but he is slowing down everyone else.
I know several who are in the second category. The problem with constantly fixing other's mistakes is the other people never learn to take responsibility. They know the people carrying the project are not going to let it fail. No matter what, whatever they did is going to get fixed.
That's a very succint description of the arrogant person and the one whom everyone mislabels as arrogant.
At my university marks and course content was divided up between exams and group projects. Individuals would optimize their own scores by focusing on exam tested content and hoping someone else in the group would carry them. People who wanted top marks always had to carry the entire group as the other members knew they could get away with not contributing and holding the grade hostage. It was a fucking nightmare, and if you complained then you were not a team player. Instead of dealing with a stressful discovery process where people promise to deliver work but fail to at the last minute I would just let the group know upfront that I’ll be carrying them. A lot of people graduated that probably shouldn’t have and I’ve been resentful of group work ever since. This was a top tier university so I’d hate to think that other universities are somehow even less rigerous.
Whenever I taught a course with group work, I would have the students give all the other students in the group a score each week. All the scores had to add up to 100. They had no problem giving any student not participating a zero. There was a formula we would run the scores through to give each student a final score that was a percentage of the total score for the project and their group participation scores. It worked quite well to give those who worked the hardest the most points and those who didn’t do any work zero points.
They tried that, it turned into this metagame with reprisals where others would work together and gang up on you so it would end up being many against one. Basically step one was to find the sucker, step two is make it stick. If you had a rep for good grades then you were de facto the sucker. You could tank the group and hope to fair better in a reshuffle but it was a lemon market and the replacements would be just as bad and now everyone knows you have given your previous team members poor scores. People quickly learned to never do that. So part of the optimization was to present lecturers with what they want to see with only minor deviations between individual rankings, effectively a voting ring. Presenting a false projection of reality in order to metagame politics was accidentally good training for real world work - but it really sucks having to do the work of 4 people.
I’m sure if the lecturers cared they could have managed it properly but they didn’t I don’t know of any who did.
I should point out that I only taught online course. The students lived all over the world and never met in person.
This whole discussion is about that you should expect and embrace this experience because while it’s possible to not end up in an organization like that, it… doesn’t happen often. This is the rare case where uni grading and real life are actually in sync.
I think the idea that almost everything is a “group project” in life and that the things learned from school group projects carry over beyond to the rest of life holds true. It’s a simplification but has more than an ounce of truth.
Definitely! I had several university group projects where several of the team members did little-to-nothing. If you want to succeed you gotta drag people along. It's actually better if they're honest about it, telling you they're not going to be able to do the work either on time or to the expected standards. Instead, I find people pretend things are "going well", then produce crap other people, superstars or not, have to fix anyway. The top 20% is supporting the bottom 80%.
It took me a while to figure out the underlying problem with "group projects" in school, but I think what I eventually settled on is that there's no way for the grader to have any insight into the group dynamics. Or at least, after some non-trivial thought on the topic, I haven't come up with any. This creates certain inevitable pathologies; why shouldn't the whole group just sort of bet on one of their members doing all the work? Many of these people wouldn't even care if they only get a C out of it, really.
But that doesn't match the real world. In the real world managers dig into that all the time. They develop understandings of the performance of individual team members. If they don't, we call that a pathology and it's their fault because they have all the tools and time they need to do it. Certainly many fail at that and there are plenty of complaints about that in this discussion, but it isn't inevitable the way it is for a school grader.
I see no way to resolve this gap, and as a result, my recommendation, for all the zero good it will do, is that schools need to just accept they can't really simulate a group project and stop assigning them.
For those stuck in them in school, I have no particular advice. I'm not sure what I would do myself if I were placed in such a scenario again. Probably just grumble and be the guy doing the project again.
But for those in a work situation, you have a reasonably good chance of having an option you may not realize: Document, document, document! Document that your current task is blocked on $SLACKER's work. Document that you added unit tests to $SLACKER's work around your needs and they failed and you sent it back. Document that they broke the unit tests to make them pass and it still doesn't meet your needs. Document, document, document.
There's two reasons for this: One, it covers your own bum. You will find that even if at first you may be pushed into being a "team player" there does generally come a point where SLACKER needs to contribute something meaningful themselves to be of any value. Second, to get an employee fired nowadays, you need a solid documentation trail. If your manager does not or can not make one, well, they don't really have to. You can go a long ways towards providing HR with one yourself.
I don't guarantee that will work in every situation, but I would suggest that you not let your cynicism block you from at least trying here. And to be honest, if that just completely doesn't work and you are in a situation where HR is just perfectly OK with a paper trail of documented lack of performance over a period of time, well, maybe that's a signal it's time to leave. Even a cynic can see that paper makes the world go round and you can often turn that to your own advantage with just a bit of effort.
In my experience, it often does match the real world. Many dev managers are out-of-touch with day-to-day work. They often don't have the time to get into the details. Example: It's been 10 years since I last had one that helped with code reviews, or even looked at PRs. Direct complaints are often ignored because they don't want to rock the boat or deal with the additional work.
Great points about how managers can help, as it is their job. At a company, there are the incentives but the desired output by any means necessary (e.g. relying on the “superstar”) can supersede creating a solid team.
Regarding improving group projects in schools: This is not a good idea, but a thought: school groups have rotating “managers” that are made to mainly coordinate and communicate with the professor. This mirrors the dynamic in industry, but I can see it becoming a nightmare, far worse than the current paradigm.
Also, documentation is a great idea, and I think pull requests are useful way to track this and improve the situation - by taking action to fix a problem and create an artifact of the action (with comments on the why).
(the $SLACKER env var is a nice touch. The goal is to have never get defined, but alas.)
Most people see this, and yet the reaction of many is to be deeply, passionately outraged that two people could ever be recognized or compensated differently.
The problem here is that once you have a metric for outsized compensation you make it 10x easier for a cheater to snatch it up merely by turning it into a target. (Lines of code, commits, etc.)
What's worse is that your metric is as likely to be out of sync as code comments. If you're lucky you can notice that a) a new "10x" is actually adding value in a way you never thought to measure, and b) you already spent that 10x money on the employees whose "10x" is hacking your metrics as targets. More likely, you just notice "a" and not "b."
I think the outrage over this goes all the way back to the Greeks. IIRC Plato had a Socratic dialogue about the politician generally beating the expert in debate because the politician is an expert in persuasion. "Being an engineer" isn't a solution because, as you imply, at some point the engineer has to pay the bills. And it's at that point they are out of their element and subject to the politician who specializes in persuading engineers to do things.
If I were wrong, engineers would have long used a web-of-trust to publicly post their salaries (or perhaps anonymized statistics derived from them) to ensure companies aren't taking advantage of anyone at scale.
Edit: clarification
Sure, it’s difficult for people outside the group to reliably ascertain who actually contributed what and how it relates to the final output’s quality. Collective grading in group projects is a sacrifice of a small bit of justice for a great deal of administrative convenience - not the last time that will happen in a student’s life.
But when a system does bother with individual differences in contribution, inequality is seen as necessarily unjust. I don’t see how you can live through a group project and believe that. Some people contributing much more than others or being much more competent than others is eminently plausible! That’s how most things go!
You have encountered Price’s Law. https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/
This all makes sense for knowledge workers, but what about the rest of the world?
In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office.
Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up.
This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?
This hero worshippong always puzzles me. All real world examples, from certified sport super stars to actual rock stars, show us that the proverbial employee rockstar is a myth.
No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them.
A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon.
Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.
I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad.
The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.
I didn't say anything about salaries, did I? Which team so do you think would do better:
- Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs
- the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys
What do you think?
How else do you define rockstar? Does being worth 100x the next guy not qualify? This is specifically relevant because football is a salary cap sport - every dollar on Brady is money not spent on someone else and therefore is a direct reflection of his measured value on the field.[0] As opposed to euro-football or older F1, where budgets are more flexible.
To your question: You can always saddle a 'rockstar' with enough negative-value players to result in poor overall performance. You've contriving an irrelevant situation -- also one where you've put 53 rockstars,[1] against a bunch of highschoolers plus one rockstar. Just about every player on the Dallas cowboys, except maybe the kicker/punter would drag an average highschool to the state championship.
[0]And we all know how that has turned out over the last 20 odd years.
[1]Rockstar-ship is situational/relative - the backup RB on the cowboys is a scrub in the NFL. He would also be the best highdchool player in the country by a large margin (aka a rockstar).
Backup team of the Cowboys (or any NFL team) would absolutely destroy Brady and a high school team.
Saying "a star can't do it without a team" is very silly. That's like saying "well, sure but Shakespeare couldn't have written anything with a pen". True at some level, but I think we both know in that equation whether the pen or the man was more valuable. The point is that teams are necessary, but in many cases, are easier to come by than stars. Engineering stars do exist. Not all are loose cannons, like in popular culture. Some just do great work that others can't.
Shakespeare's works likely wouldn't have been known without a team of performers to perform them, without an audience willing to accept them, no one gets anything done alone.
I thought it was pretty well established that Shakespeare had a team of writers?
In my "big tech company", there's a thorough (and I think overall fair) evaluation process, and a very high performer can earn a significant amount of money, e.g. 10x the salary of a junior. People are also strongly incentized to deliver through bonuses and stock refresher.
I'm not denying that what you describe exists in some (most?) companies, but there are tons of companies out there, and it's also up to employees to do their homework and find places that suits their values and ambitions. They do exist!
A junior at BigTech averages around $170K. Are you really saying a high performer can make $1.7 million in compensation a year? I’m sure there are a very few that do.
Look at Google [1] and Meta [2], this seems to be in the ballpark. There are people with such high salaries, but they are very few and more than just high-performers.
[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...
Sure, but there are very few high performers.
Ok, seriously curious - how does this evaluation process look like, at least in broad strokes? I haven't yet seen one that would make incentives aligned, but you got my hopes up. :)
My experience with those big companies and those tough but allegedly fair review processes is that management has no idea who is actually doing the work, and disproportionately compensates people they like on a personal level, unfairly. The bias reenforces itself when the "top performers" are preferentially assigned prestigious work that can look good on the next review. You can tell who the stupidest people in the organization are by the faith they have in the fairness and appropriateness of the review system.
One strong argument (maybe the only one) for the concept of controlling superstar players is the reality that they are going to leave, eventually; maybe for a better job, maybe retirement, maybe they get hit by a bus. If your output is entirely dependent on a superstar, it inevitably won't be durable against their departure; one way to look at corporations is through the lens of efficiency maximizers, but another equally valid way of thinking about them is through the lens of durability maximizers. The day-to-day actions of most people inside a corporation is far better pattern-matched toward Survivability, not Efficiency.
Take any company, and grade it (personally!) on both "how ideologically driven is their mission" and "how productive are they"; eight times out of ten it'll correlate. New companies like OpenAI ("we're inventing machine intelligence"; strong ideology/mission); extremely productive. Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, extremely strong, important mission, extremely productive. Some smaller companies like 37Signals, very ideologically/personality driven, very productive. There's even a few big tech companies left, like Cloudflare, that have strong, coherent mission drive ("Building A Better Internet") and have productivity to match it.
One counter-example (and why its, like, eight out of ten): Microsoft. No one has any clue what Microsoft's mission is. That product factory still churns out more new stuff than anyone on the west coast.
Those two paragraphs are 100% connected, because roughly the only way to mitigate (not eliminate) the risk of superstars leaving is high, coherent mission drive. "High" means "its clear, its communicated, its meaningful" and "coherent" means "its practiced, its demonstrated, its genuine". Compensation is another way, but the problems with compensation are (1) you will lose the compensation fight with competitors eventually, (2) it selects for actors that aren't interested in anything except compensation, and (3) it breeds complacency/retirement without simultaneous high+coherent mission drive (Nvidia's problem right now).
Oxide [1] is an interesting case-study in mitigating some negative impacts of high compensation; "Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location."
It just comes down to: Poor Leadership. If the product is boring, if leadership can't coherently communicate mission, direction, value, etc; superstars aren't going to join or stay for very long. Everything else is window dressing. In the absence of that, the most effective way to maintain continuity of operations is normalization and "the bell curve".
Also: If you find yourself believing "well, some companies just don't operate in an area where high mission drive is even possible, not every company is on the bleeding edge of AI CryptoTech", just stop. I don't care what you're doing; building a high, coherent mission is always possible. Amazon's mission is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. That's a freakin awesome mission that would resonate with a ton of superstars, and its a mission that every damn company could have, if their leadership chooses it and is high quality enough to live it.
[1] https://oxide.computer/careers
I must say that I have heard that "hit by a bus" argument once too many.
What I see:
1 People very rarely get hit by a bus.
2 When someone leaves, two things happen.
A) Someone else, very often previously anonymous, becomes the new rock star.
B) It turns out that super important thing that guy was expert on was not so important after all...
I use 'hit by a bus' sometimes, it's just a metaphor for leaves abruptly without much notice.
You never know the type of employee and their motives for leaving until they do. Some are excellent and spend two weeks documenting and knowledge sharing. Some take a two week vacation. This point is orthogonal to superstar.
Yes obviously it is a metaphor.
And I am speaking from my experience and yours is different.
Just that I have felt lately that the "hit by a bus" card has been played too often close to me and it makes progress slow down.
And I feel that when it does happen, organizations are much more resilient than the worst case that is often painted.
(Changing subject) I am actually pretty intrigued by case 2A in my post, I have seen this often and sometimes it has been me.
What causes someone to step up and more importantly what prevents them from doing so before? Because it means that many orgnanizations have this as an untapped resource.
What should they do to release that resource earlier?
I feel its a valid concern, but the way companies generally respond to the concern is what is invalid. Teams should lift everyone up, not push superstars down.
E.g. How much active knowledge sharing on the superstar's domain of expertise, and even process, is happening? A luncheon once a month? Its not enough. How much time is the superstar allowed to spend documenting? Is the rest of the team actually reading it? Is active mentorship happening on the team?
Versus: Create a top-down process, make everyone follow the process, invent hypotheticals as to why the process matters, product factory, etc.
Yes, as I posted further down I am really intrigued by what makes it possible to lift other people up. Because the potential is there. Not in everyone but surely someone who would step up as the new lead if someone disappears.
Documentation is good but sometimes i feel like there is a need for something more.
Maybe the previous guy needs to move out of the way. Maybe his way of doing code reviews is discouraging - how important is it really to do everything like it was wired in his brain? Or just let go of the idea of how the code is structured?
I take mentoring seriously since this is my way of adding force multiplication without having to become a manager.
This seems like something between a conspiracy theory and your own ego going unchecked.
I observed something like this, or at least I thought I did. With many more years of reflection, and there were hints along the way as it happened in realtime, I came to realize that the contribution of those I had written off as non-performers and dead weight was actually higher than I had estimated and difficult to actually quantify. My hope for you is that you one day reach similar epiphanies. Because your attitude that some are much better than others and need to be compensated out of proportion is quite toxic. Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.
How would you suggest to reward people who strive for more?
First with an understanding that your opinions are subjective and that you will evaluate people incorrectly. Or more simply, with humility.
Second, I think if you genuinely have a complaint about dead weight it's probably better to hire selectively, cautiously and consciously rather than evaluate staff as sub-par after that point. Yes that's difficult to do especially with the first point, and it won't be perfect either.
I completely agree with the premise that labeling people dead weight is wrong. My question was about rewarding people who step further.
Specifically about this:
My personal theory is that the most important person at a company, the one most responsible for the company's success, isn't the president or CEO. It's not the star contributor or the one who writes the most lines of code.
It's whoever makes the coffee. Because without the coffee, a whole lot less work gets done.
Don't forget whoever replaces the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, either.
Another reason why today's corporations love teams and flat hierarchies is because they turn "responsibility" into a post-modern concept that fluidly adapts to mean everything or nothing. One day the boss is the boss, the next day nobody is accountable for anything, and decisions are really just the magical synergy of team dynamics.
So called flat hierarchies also mean that the ones that have the real power can never be truly challenged. It is like climbing the hill and then cutting the rope to ensure nobody else can do it.
I've seem this a lot in companies adopting agile. That was always a cabal that had all the real power and the benefits than come with it, but suddenly because of "self-organizing", "flat hierarchy", there was no more any more or less formal path for ascending in the organization.
During the first years of the scrum frenzy, the figure of the tech lead almost disappeared in a lot of companies.
That hits really close to home. Literally in a situation right now where promotion is being dangled like a carrot in front of my face without any tangible path to acquire it. Overachiever my ass.
The notion of 'culture' does this. It's a meaningless term. No-one ever says 'we fixed the business culture but the company still isn't delivering', because the culture is always inferred from the results. So as a concept it has no explanatory power whatsoever; it only obfuscates, providing a convenient cover for incompetent managers who can say dumb things like 'culture is hard to change'.
I work in the public service where accountability has been transformed from a concrete thing (who is responsible for this?) to a 'value'. So the org chart is set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, the processes are set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, but if you point this out managers will retort that it doesn't matter, because what's really important is that everyone personally commits to the value of accountability which in turn will create a culture of accountability. They've replaced performance reviews with workers writing about how much they embrace accountability (of course the absence of genuine reviews helps ensure no-one can be held accountable for poor performance).
I'm increasingly of the opinion that any manager who talks at length about culture is a moron. It's a fuzzy catch-all that can be invoked to explain anything without understanding anything, of great value to the modern manager who typically understands nothing.
Why are superstars seeking employment in corporations though?
Those outsized salaries [1] are pretty hard to resist once you know you are skilled enough to scale their interview process.
1: https://www.levels.fyi/2023/?level=Principal%20Engineer
Have you ever tried freelancing or having your own company? I never worked in corporations and honestly cannot see myself ever there, considering the money I’d been making freelancing will never be paid to me by any company in the world if they’d just hire me.
Employees can have phases of high and low productivity, tasks they struggle with and other tasks they blaze through. The article and most of the comments oversimplify things.
Interestingly, every time I see this argument brought up the people who do so seem to count themselves as part of either the average or superstar bucket ;)
Corporations that win tend to have bought themselves a moat and therefore profit to play with akin to a stipend to spend on staff. The people controlling that spend need more than anything else to look competent in their job of managing it, and so they need to work by numbers and follow safe trends. Whatever will keep them in their high paid jobs. Teasing out superstars and giving them free reign is probably not what they are incentivized to do.
Corporations are legal entities to be composition of worker ants to achieve far bigger goals than single „rock star” ever can.
Idea is that they will outlive any human life or it would be possible to detach from any single person.
There is of course cost attached of not being fully efficient, but that is irrelevant in bigger scale.
I have often wondered about this myself, and believe there's some nuance to acknowledge:
- Yes, it is absolutely the case that individuals often carry teams. It does sometimes feel like they're subsidizing others' salaries.
- There's an old adage in advertising that goes: we know 50% of our budget is wasted on ineffective ads, we just don't know which 50%. The same probably holds true for organizations allocating wages.
- People go through different phases of their lives, where they can devote more or less energy to work. This fact may lend credence to a compensation structure that's based on bonuses and equity versus salary. Flat salary bands seem to discourage meritocracy without this adjustment.
- Organizations themselves are also dynamic. Consider a small org seeded by a prolific worker. They make the org successful, so the org grows and necessarily dilutes the talent (i.e. reversion to the mean).
- Does an organization have an incentive to "slow down" it's most prolific workers so everyone else can keep up? Conversely, should they develop a culture that speeds everyone else up?
- Should / do prolific workers self-select into higher-performance organizations, e.g. after getting fed up being a big fish in a small pond?
- Team dynamics are undeniable; consider two prolific workers with different styles clashing.
I personally would love to work on a team of superstars who mesh, and can capture disproportionate value relative to large, slow, mediocre orgs. The hard part is finding one and keeping it together.
What does it mean “dragging a division of 30 people”?
That you need to hire 29 instances of the worst and least talented garbage to push just one lonely little sad superman?
I agree with your assessment.
The real challenge is how can organisations best leverage super stars to achieve great things. It's difficult because managers have to be smart and confident, and the super star can't be allowed to undermine others.
The high prevalence of insecure managers and arrogant super stars makes this hard to do.
I agree that there is typically a "superstar", but it's rarely the ones that believe they are a superstar. Often times the so-called "superstar adds so much abstraction and complexity to a product that it feels only they can deal with it, because the rest of the team can't and does not want to deal with it. Work piles up and moves very slowly and it feels the "superstar" is the only one who does the job. Then superstar burns out, quits and leaves the "mediocre" team to deal with the mess.
For me a "superstar" is a friendly capable coder, who simplifies, teaches and learns in a feedback loop. They are indeed very rare.
I think this varies by corporation, but large corporations at their root have a desire to treat their employees as cogs, because that is the simplest system for them to implement. It is on the employees to make it clear that they are not cogs, which is why politics tends to be a much bigger factor in such companies.
If your corporation is not compensating you enough to deal with the additional headache of politics, I'd try working for a smaller company.
Amen. very true..
"Processes" are for factories. Diluting is good for factories, cogs.
For some type of 'creationary' work, it's also fine.
I’ve seen this many times. Only exception was an early stage startup where they really only hired extremely solid folks. Larger or even small but very hierarchical companies have been full of mediocre performers.
Customers want consistency. That’s why management turns people into a reliable system where anyone can quit without affecting the outcome of the system. Just like engineers think about software as a system, business people think about companies as a system. McDonalds is the prime example of this. If you enter one of the stores, it doesn’t matter whether John or Dave is in that day. The burger will be the same.
Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.
Your zero sum outlook assumes that everyone does the same job, when the primary point of a convening an organization is combining different specializations and dividing labor accordingly.
You never saw it go differently but it must be in many organisation.
I can't imagine you can sustain the technical excellence over decades in places like Nvidia, Apple, Nintendo, ... without having a very robust process of protecting high-performance deeply technical people from wider organisational politics.
Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?