This reminds me of the experiment to get the best chickens for laying; every so often they'd get rid of the chickens that didn't lay as much and swap in for a new set, continually getting rid of the lower X%.
In the end, the overall output was lower because all the "alpha layers" spent more time fighting than laying.
As a software dev, I can't count the number of times HR/hiring managers go for the 10x people, exclusively, and end up with an org that just can't drive in any one direction.
Yeah, this is something I had to learn when I was younger in my career.
One of the highest value devs I've worked with was nicknamed the "gold plated bulldozer." He's not a 10x dev. He's not a rockstar. But you know what he does do? He shows up every day and burns his way down the issue list. He doesn't complain. He doesn't try to only work on the exciting tickets. He doesn't cause drama arguing over this or that grand conceptual scheme or architecture. He just plugs away and gets things done. Sure, with a tough algorithmic or architectural problem he'd need to ask someone, but he'd just do that without any ego involved.
It didn't really click for me until I was looking at some long term stats for that team and realized in terms of pushing the ball forward, he was doing more than just about any of us.
I think it's disappointing people like that are not just overlooked, but almost held in contempt by the more startup end of the software industry.
I’m currently working at a company with lots of smart people.
But everyone wants to work on the sexy stuff. The core parts of the business either don’t get done or they are half-assed. It’s like a dozen monkeys banging at a dozen typewriters. Lots of noise but little productive work.
As the saying goes “everyone wants to come to the party but no one wants to clean up”.
Quality employees know not everything is fun or exciting to work on. Hell, some of the most important stuff is viewed as “boring”.
But valuable employees recognize what’s important for the business not just their own careers or own interests.
> But valuable employees recognize what’s important for the business not just their own careers or own interests.
That's valuable to the business. The problem is how to make it valuable to the employee.
When I started out in programming, I fell in with a set of people who attached a lot of importance to Delivering Business Value. It was what you did to earn respect within that group. Great for employers, but looking back, it seems a bit one-sided.
The usual answer is stock. But in any organisation larger than about five people, the relationship between your output and the stock value is too wobbly for that to work.
There's an arsenal of incentives like bonuses and promotions. But in practice, as many commentators have observed, those don't go to the people actually doing valuable work.
I think there are two different kinds of 10x developer. Really they're probably better called 3x and infiniteX:
3x: I once knew a developer who could write code about as fast as they could type. It would generally work, be inefficient, and sometimes buggy, but it moved the ball forward relentlessly. If you had a basic task to get done, this person could do it and be done in 1/3rd, or even 1/5th, the time it might take someone else.
infiniteX: I also once knew a developer who could solve problems almost no one else could. If you needed something to scale perfectly to accomplish a large task in reasonable time, this person was the perfect candidate. They weren't fast, and spent a lot of time just thinking.
It sounds like the guy referenced above was the 3x type.
in the original experiment (sackman, erickson, and grant) they were able to successfully solve programming-contest-style problems in a tenth of the time that other people required. so maybe ten hours instead of 100 hours. this should not surprise anyone who's worked on a programming team or who has looked at code they wrote ten or twenty years previously. the actual ratios were from 5:1 to 28:1, but that was an understatement, because some of the programmers couldn't solve the problem at all in the allotted time, if I understand correctly in some cases because they decided to solve it in assembly language. sackman, erickson, and grant suggested firing the 1× performers:
> Validated techniques to detect and weed out these poor performers could result in vast savings in time, effort, and cost.
complaints and issue lists were not evaluated, but rewriting twice a month would have resulted in not completing the tasks they were being evaluated on
Developing truly innovative solutions to hard problems? Doing the hard stuff like documenting code and writing automated tests? Fixing bugs that no one else could? Proactively identifying and resolving software reliability and performance issues?
Consistency was never a part of 10x developer definition as I understood it. That label is more often than not applied to "talent", however nebulous it is defined. Consistency is very underrated and hard to develop a habit for.
I call those types of people the Claude Makelele of programming, and for those not familiar with soccer I guess Dennis Rodman would be a close comparison.
Without the likes of Makelele and Rodman teams like early to mid-2000s Real Madrid and the 1990s Chicago Bulls would have had way less trophies and wins (the Real Madrid of that era was even nicknamed galacticos/galactics because of the amount of soccer stars they had among their ranks) .
This does actually remind me of how flight controllers were simultaneously selected and trained: the sim team designed scenarios that were specifically tailored to exercise some controller's weak point, over and over. They were very creative in how to exploit controllers' weaknesses.
Some controllers took their simulator failures as serious lessons and improved. Others didn't stomach the constant failures and dropped out of the programme. I don't know what proportion of alpha chicken they got, but from what I can tell, the flight controllers were really good at their jobs.
I've always wanted to explore adversarial simulation as a training and selection method but I have yet to find an occsassion that warrants it.
Ideally in most jobs you want people who enjoy getting better, even if it means they don't get to shine.
Trying hard and fucking up sucks for everyone, but if I were to hire someone I'd rather have someone that can learn from their/our mistakes than someone who abandons ship once the grass is greener elsewhere.
I actually admire G. W. Bush's speed of thought here... most people wouldn't be able to stop before delivering, by their own words, a perfectly recorded media bite of "shame on me"... that would've been played non stop ever since.
Instead he was able to stop and deliver an iconic line that is quoted ever since to make fun of him.
> I actually admire G. W. Bush's speed of thought here...
That's a novel interpretation of the gaffe. So you're saying he repaired the expression mid utterance because it was better to sound like a bumbler who couldn't remember a common expression than to utter "shame on me" and have people play it out of context. Maybe? If this were the only instance of him mangling an expression, or all the other instances could be interpreted as rescuing him from a sound bite, this might be more convincing. Try these:
> I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.
or
> Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?
> "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking 'bout new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
> "It was not always a given that the United States and America would have a close relationship"
> "Who could have possibly considered an erection in Iraq at this point in history?"
> "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."
This clip[1] totally changed my perspective on George W. Bush. The man may misspeak a lot but he is cunning and quick on his feet. He knows how to play into his weaknesses.
I just see someone who led us into the Iraq War on lies, who gave us Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, Abu Ghraib and ISIS saying, "Aww, shucks. I don't pay them critics no mind."
Sure, whatever. I see those things too, but I see a whole lot more.
I used to think George W. Bush was stupid, but after watching this I don't think he is. I think that he played stupid because it lulled people into allowing him to get away with those terrible things that he did.
You should see that too. It's important because otherwise you'll be tricked by somebody like him again.
The Trump situation has forced me to re-evaluate. I was highly critical of GW, but to be fair I think he was genuinely trying to do the best for the US and its interests at the time. I don’t buy the idea that he was totally corrupt and only in it for himself and his cronies. We’ve actually seen what that really looks like now. He just had a distorted idea of what the national interests were, and too few scruples in pursuing those interests, as he saw them. He couldn’t see the negative effects, or discounted them too much.
He was however, surrounded by people who were manipulating his earnestness to the degree that it was only to in it for themselves and their cronies. Dick Cheney was by all accounts, one of the most powerful vice presidents of the modern age and pushed GWB along on many things and was a key player in convincing GWB (and alot of other people) about WMDs in Iraq, and Dick Cheney was allowed to get away with alot of abuse of power in the position of vice president.
I also agree he didn't have a timely re-assessment of the downsides of his actions.
I see a man who wants to sound clever and charming by speaking fast and by using an heavy accent as if he's one of the people. The location also speaks 'This is where the American people live'.
I really don't understand how people fall for this 'I'm one of you guys' trick.
On the other hand, I might be biased, living in a democratic country.
I have a friend who researches botany, and it's the same thing for plants. If you only grow the "best" corn, you end up selecting for corn that slurps all the nutrients away from the other corn in the corn field and getting lower total yield. He says that we humans should do what natural selection cannot, which is to use group selection to pick the corn that is best at playing well with others, not just getting ahead individually.
The other problem with hiring 'only' 10x people - or having them call the shots without oversight for that matter - is that they pick or - worse - build overly complicated solutions that the non-10x people can't work with or don't understand.
10x is a misnomer in my comment though; 10x refers to productivity, not skill level / intelligence / complexity.
In the end, the overall output was lower because all the "alpha layers" spent more time fighting than laying.
As a software dev, I can't count the number of times HR/hiring managers go for the 10x people, exclusively, and end up with an org that just can't drive in any one direction.