I like this framing. My previous framing came from `Loonshots`, where Bahcall frames this as "Artists" (Revolutionaries) and "Soldiers" (Evolutionary). I felt that, in the context of engineering, Artist/Soldier felt dismissive against the soldier. Revolutionary/Evolutionary avoids that for the better.
One mitigating thing I remember from that book is that no person is inherently classified as an "artist" or a "soldier" it's more that people can be operating in that mode depending on their current role, or even dividing time between one mode or the other depending on the circumstances.
> What’s most infectious is how deeply they care. Their goal is to get to the right answer, not to look good.
This is the difference between the revolutionary colleague and the jerk.
Some people are self-described “truth tellers” (I.e. jerks). Or the annoying ones whose motivation is to look “good”.
The ones who are genuine are hard to get upset with.
I’ve pretty much only worked at “cause” companies. I would think someone like this might be annoying at a company “revolutionizing the corporate purchasing space”
I'm not sure how useful of a description for revolutionaries this is. They are not necessarily lonely wolfs as I interpret the article, they might deeply care or not about things like diversity and they are certainly able to do a lot of politicking. Unless you want to completely redefine the term.
For me the difference comes more down to, as with the conflicts within lots of political groups in history: reformists vs non-reformists. The former advocating the reform of an existing system or institution whereas the others believe the right approach is abolition and replacement. You could also add reactionaries, those that want to go back how things used to be.
Neither of which is universally true I think, more often than not it is a mix. But I don't think you get very far trying to mix the extremes from either side.
It’s an interesting framing overall, but I’m not really convinced that the R/E distinction is as clear in real life.
The key attribute that both R and E types here seem to share is _caring_ and a commitment to a larger team goal/outcome.
The care/don’t care distinction seems clearer to me and much more recognizable. Within _cares_ people, there may be a further divide in styles, between progressive idealist and tactical/strategic (corresponding to R and E). But the thing about caring, is if you care, you’ll notice if your approach isn’t working or you need to change your style to suit the environment.
The implication of this framing is that leaders really need to make sure there is a clear vision/goal/outcome/mission for the _cares_ people to organize around. They also may need to recognize that most people unfortunately don’t care about their work or their contribution to society beyond raising their children and consuming, and that’s fine/not likely to change.
For people who care, then, the task is to recruit/organize the people in the organization to help avoid counterproductive work, and nudge things in the right direction.
(And of course, like nearly all categorizations of complex human systems into binary, my categorization is just a concept to organize thought, not an assertion of truth; people are fluid and drift between and sit on a spectrum between those categories)
The mission is normally the same: to make the founders very rich. Everything feeds into that with a layer of “we better be reasonably good to staff because its hard to attract and retain talent”.
When there isn’t supply/demand on your side then as a worker you end up like the factory workers who have to work through a tornado.
My caring comes from pride in my work and intrinsic motivation mostly, not from the mission of the company. The mission after all is to make people rich.
Thats why i find bonuses weird. A bonus is based on a metric, and that metric is probably gameable. Share of revenue is probably best if you want to pay a bonus. Or just increase salaries.
Seems like a good article but I was kind of hoping it was going to be about hippie anarchist hackers in the workplace. They're always my favorite coworkers.
This is just pseudoscience. No studies, no test, just a guy opinion.
Stop clarifying people this way. It's not useful, it's not insightfully. I have seen coworkers fighting for one thing but not another. One fights against bad work ethics, another for good tech and another one for their own right too be with his family. People is complex, everything comes in gradients and that changes as people grows and they learn and their lives change.
If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
You can't just call something you disagree with pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is when an argument is presented in a way that directly suggests it's a scientific finding, or suggests that it follows the scientific method, but does so only superficially.
No part of this article is intended to mislead you into thinking it's scientific or technical in nature. It is one person's opinion and they are sharing it and there's nothing wrong with that. You can disagree, agree, share your own insights, but calling it pseudoscience is uncalled for.
>If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of consensus on this and most other subjects, as well as an inability to reproduce a substantial portion of research. Take two different psychology courses related to what the author is discussing and you'll come away with two very different understandings.
Finally I would like to distinguish psychology from psychiatry, as the two are often lumped together, unfairly so.
You are right, this is just bullshit. It does not pretend to be a scientific study, I over interpreted what it was saying.
> There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of consensus on this and most other subjects
That is a reason to beware of some random opinion, assertiveness does not need to correlate with reason. That this text is assertive does not make it valuable. I see no more learning that people will categorize others in search of a simplicity that is not there. As I said, it's not insightful in any way, it just simplifies to make people feel smart and think that they understand some truth that is no there.
One can't wipe his own ass these days without it being scientifically proven to exist by a study. The same studies that can't get no replication. And even if they do, aren't actionable at all. Decision paralysis as religion.
"Things are complicated" gets thrown against every opinion that people don't like. Not saying anything is wisdom. God forbid anybody has any opinion and may God strike him down if he ever supports anything but tabula rasa.
Things got done before studies existed, you know. People built models from intuition and tested them in practice. Or observed patterns. But that's the old wrong ways, right? We publish something on a piece of paper now and unless a committee publishes it and calls it a study it can't be true. And if they do it's true and will remain this way forever, right?
My problem with the piece was that people were limited to two types: "revolutionary" and "evolutionary." I think you just played "skeptic" for us. So whether you intended it that way or not, thank you!
Blog posts etc. obviously don't need to be scientific studies and there's nothing wrong with people posting them here if they're interesting. HN is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal or conference.
Was Baudrillard's point essentially that capitalism is always the "main" function (hee hee) in the outer scope with everything else becoming subroutines/subprocesses/etc. of it? E.g., "Revolutionary" here is merely a local variable to a function do_capitalism_more_efficiently, rather than itself being a global variable in its own right.
I mean, I get that Baudrillard was essentially focusing on certain edge cases: e.g., where function challenge_capitalism was in fact running in a VM that was spun up by function do_capitalism_more_efficiently. But with that caveat, is there anything important I'm missing from his writing with my analogies to scope here?
> Consider the ratio of R to E on the team when hiring
Even accepting his premise of Rs vs Es, this seems absurdly short-sighed. Engineers come and go, engineers can change their R/E approach over time or based on project. If you feel like you can't manage a team full of Rs - and decide to hire a less talented E for balance - then the problem is the way you manage. Take ownership of your employees and find ways to use their talents, don't throw your hands up and hire for some personality type that you imagine you've sussed out over a set of one hour interviews.
I’ve adopted one or another approach in different projects and teams, it depends. Sometimes the team lacks someone to “push” the project in the bold, but ultimately right direction, and the only thing stopping is inertia/fear/politics. Other times it’s not clear what the “right” direction is and you need to discover together.
I guess it takes some calibration to know when it’s the time to be the jerk, but there are times it’s definitely necessary.
Mixed feelings; maybe just feeling a bit defensive as I fear I’ve been playing the role of revolutionary in my current work and don’t care for some of the negative descriptions which unnervingly ring pretty true.
Mid article though, it says
> That’s because organizations tend to become more bureaucratic, political and consensus-driven as they grow.
Is this somehow ever a good thing? Largely, all of those things just seem bad. Luxuries of inefficiency a product can enjoy only once it works itself into dominant/monopoly position where it’s bankrolling becomes secure.
The groups I’ve moved away from over the years (often with other revolutionaries moving on as well), became more evolutionary. And all of them have basically devolved into product lines on life support, the “evolutionary” employees left behind don’t understand why management won’t invest in them and would rather buy up competitive offerings to remain relevant.
> organizations tend to become more bureaucratic, political and consensus-driven as they grow
Hot take: a big part of the utility of these "mature" companies in society is to serve as a kind of glorified daycare for adults. The people they employ can feel like they're contributing something to society, and legitimately earning the money they're bringing home, even if a bird's eye view would reveal that they're just treading water and not really producing any net benefit. This allows the employees to feel better about themselves than they would if the government just handed them a UBI paycheck and sent them back to playing videogames all day.
I've seen a lot of turmoil between people who are legitimately trying to make the world a better place through their work (spoiler: it wasn't always me), and coworkers that prefer to just operate in daycare mode.
If you're interested in more discussions along this road, then Bahcall's `Loonshots` is a good read. Lots of anecdotes, little science, great stories. Overall I found it fascinating. I found myself nodding along to most of the goodread's reviews, if you find yourself on the fence.
On-topic, I think its a natural evolution for organizations to stagnate and calcify unless there is a fundamental recreation. Lots of things could be cherry-picked here for anecdata (Roman Republic, Roman Empire, General Electric, <insert fortune 100 company here>)
I don't think that's bad. You wouldn't want an innovative person being your line cook at a restaurant -- you want the innovative person to be the chef. We also don't want the laws governing the countries we live in to violently change. Systemic, evolutionary, progress is good.
The challenge is figuring out a balance and what to do to prevent the organization from calcifying (becoming product lines on life support), prevent it from throwing away what makes the organization good (chasing the next big thing), and continue to let the organization innovate and thrive (stay relevant) without being eaten.
I like this article, but there's another way of classifying that I also like: letter grades (remember those from school?) which uses hiring psychology a little more. In a successful startup, whom you hire makes or breaks you.
'A' players hire 'A' players.
'B' players hire 'C' players.
Independent of Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary, we have pure intelligence, education, and animal cunning. An 'A' player has all those, and moreover knows when a Revolutionary strategy is required, and when it's not.
A 'B' player tends to be Evolutionary, because it's safer, but occasionally he'll say "me, too!" to a Revolutionary if it seems to advance his career.
An 'A' player can recognize another one. That's all he or she wants to hire.
A 'B' player is bewildered and threatened by an 'A" player, and moreover, the 'A' player wants nothing to do with him. So he wants to hire someone who's safe and no threat to his tenuous position: the 'C' player.
After the startup is successful, the 'B' managers flood it with their resumes. They like a safe bet. Once they get in and start hiring their own, it's all over.
Substitute the variables A and B with jew and gentile, or black and white, and even white and black, and maybe you understand how hateful and retarded the original comment is.
We need you (i.e. everyone here) to follow the rules regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is.
Everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse—this is more or less a hardwired perception, or at least difficult to extricate from. If people use that as a basis for how they respond to others, we're guaranteed a downward spiral. That's what we're trying to avoid in this forum, that's why we have the site guidelines, and that's why the guidelines don't depend on how other commenters are behaving.
That is, pardon the directness, bad pop psychology.
If A players could recognize another one, our industry's hiring wouldn't be so incredibly broken.
The idea that there are clear layers of engineering skill is... just plain wrong, and that's obvious to anyone who's worked on more than a few teams. It's a spectrum, and more, it's multidimensional. So is the idea that somehow people not in the top layer automatically hire worse people. I've worked with top skilled people (think "starting an entire new segment") who couldn't hire their way out of a wet paper bag. I've work with solid performers who weren't outstanding in any way, except they consistently hired excellent people.
I've also worked with people who were mediocre performers by themselves, but who significantly accelerated any team they were on. Not by visible output, but by being clearly necessary "glue" that bound the team closer together and helped people to shine.
I've seen superstars go to mediocre, and vice versa, just based on managers and or team they were on.
If you can't think about people in more subtle ways than "A,B,C" or "Revolutionaries vs Evolutionaries", you are significantly shortchanging yourself and your team.
I don't think you really understand the power of simple metrics. Making an assumption (perhaps invalid) based on your submissions and comments, you seem to be in a line of work whose sales pitch is "Things are complex. You need to hire us to explain it all to you." Or maybe you've worked on games; it's hard to tell.
Since you've alluded to your experiences: I've picked a startup based only on their business description, where I didn't know a single person, and it IPO'ed in about 18 months. Then the 'B' players flooded in, and some other unrelated stuff happened. What have you done?
Yeah, that's fair. No one's advocating making all decisions on a single factor.
I think when outside "experts" come in and talk to you, they have one Summary slide at the end that gives their own "simple metrics" and that's what everyone remembers anyway.
> I've picked a startup based only on their business description, where I didn't know a single person, and it IPO'ed in about 18 months.
Anybody can do that once. If you could do it a hundred times in a row, or develop a science of picking startups, I might be more inclined to believe you.
You seem to think that you profited by sheer force of will and that no luck was involved. Evidence suggests there is an enormous amount of luck involved, in that the best startup investors still fail to profit most of the time. Without knowing more about your methodology, your claims here are akin to suggesting that one should only hire people who win the lottery, because clearly they're good at picking numbers.
Trying to read the entrails into another poster's personality in response to a not very inflammatory comment is just plain gross. A pity, I was interested in reading Inventing the Future, but this sort of classless rude behavior has changed my mind.
Yeah, I bet you were in the very process of buying it. Maybe you can still cancel your order.
Let's review: the original article was a bit of pop psychology, like almost all "management science." I replied with some of my own. None of this is a double-blind, peer-reviewed study, and even if it were, it probably wouldn't be replicable, as others have pointed out.
groby_b then replied with some high-sounding condescension, puffing himself up: "our industry's hiring wouldn't be so incredibly broken" via all the incredible things he's seen. Except he didn't use any overt insults -- just passive aggressiveness.
It's been on my list of reads on Silicon Valley history. Good job explaining your position, but since you responded to me with sarcasm I think I'll just read Fire in the Valley by Swaine and Freiberger instead.
I've worked on DIS. I've worked on industrial automation. I've worked on AAA games. Yes, I've been on (successful) startups as well. Yes, I've consulted, too. I've worked on the European space program. I'm currently responsible for a good-sized engineering org.
I'm in this business for something like 30+ years now. And based on all those experiences, I'm fairly certain that your simplistic approach will bite you, your team, your project at some point. I'm also fairly certain that you'll protest that strenuously until it happens. So, godspeed, and may the experience not be too painful.
I like how you wrapped condescension and a humble brag in the same breath.
You invested in a company and profited by it. That's all that tells us. B can follow A, it doesn't follow that A caused B.
I see this in finance all the time. Traders perform so inconsistently at long timeframes, no better than chance, but think their training—domain knowledge—gives them systems knowledge. Systems are more than the sum of their parts or the individual actions of agents.
Boxing people into USDA grades like flesh is only ever constraining and I don't think the abstraction here collapses any uncertainty in exchange.
They’re the B players who suck up to wealth holders.
Are there A players? Everyone gets a handout at some point. The ultra rich get one in the form of no taxes. An A player would surely just be a billionaire.
Sure is easy being an A player when your handouts from decades ago earned a lot of interest.
How are we still this oblivious? We spent the last decade making building these things this easy on purpose.
Where is the A game in using the machine how it was intended?
How'd the the "'B' player" get a job in the first place? Does an "'A' player" have a half life at which they degrade to "'B' player?" Is the letterness of any basket of skills and traits context dependent so that an "'A' player" used car salesperson is a "'C' player" philosopher but the "'A player" philosopher recognize that person as a fellow "'A' player" but can't understand their lack of wisdom-love?
What value do you find in inventing a caste system for engineers? Psychology already suffers from a replication crisis and pseudoscientific quackery; corporate psychology is even less broadly applicable to humans.
People are not static; they're not just their genes, and they're not just a grade. You said you're an A player, why don't we compare your hiring to a random selection of hiring managers with similar experience in your field?
My degree was in Integrative Neuroscience and I'd caution people against these "just so!" explanations. A good narrative is often more convincing than the correct one.
This is the same kind of organizational naivete displayed by armchair middle-manager wannabes that think stack ranking is a great idea too.
Once you start trying to codify potential or current employees into buckets delineated by simplistic and frankly silly metrics and not by the value they produce in a given set of domains and contexts, then you've already lost the game.
You'll note, HN'ers, that I never said that I was an A player, nor that engineers can all be divided up into castes. You all seem to be extrapolating based on your own prejudices.
It's just a (sometimes) useful way of thinking about top executives, who mostly can be assigned grades. Engineers are too complex to be divided that way.
As for me: yes, some A players did decide I could be useful. I think I was, as an engineer, and they thought so too. On hiring people: the record was more mixed; some good and some not so great.
If we look at any personality type system, the revolutionary/reformers are going to be a quadrant of discrete personalities (and even those can be broken down or treated as a gradient).
As an easy example, I'm one of the types in that quadrant. While I tend to be independent and self confident, I'm not "an inspiring leader". I also have a strong preference for consensus (or at least peaceful agreement), and prefer not being the center of attention.
Please give this piece about as much attention as you would todays horoscope and instead read a few good papers on pubmed.
An interesting read that has a lot of face value for me, but I wonder if the "R" and "E" typings are stable through life, and how amenable are they are to change?
The article comes across like "R" and "E" are set characteristics--almost like a personality trait. I'd really like to longitudinal see data on R/E mobility, and how fluidity between R/E types might be related to team cohesion overall.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39863447-loonshots
This is the difference between the revolutionary colleague and the jerk.
Some people are self-described “truth tellers” (I.e. jerks). Or the annoying ones whose motivation is to look “good”.
The ones who are genuine are hard to get upset with.
I’ve pretty much only worked at “cause” companies. I would think someone like this might be annoying at a company “revolutionizing the corporate purchasing space”
For me the difference comes more down to, as with the conflicts within lots of political groups in history: reformists vs non-reformists. The former advocating the reform of an existing system or institution whereas the others believe the right approach is abolition and replacement. You could also add reactionaries, those that want to go back how things used to be.
Neither of which is universally true I think, more often than not it is a mix. But I don't think you get very far trying to mix the extremes from either side.
The key attribute that both R and E types here seem to share is _caring_ and a commitment to a larger team goal/outcome.
The care/don’t care distinction seems clearer to me and much more recognizable. Within _cares_ people, there may be a further divide in styles, between progressive idealist and tactical/strategic (corresponding to R and E). But the thing about caring, is if you care, you’ll notice if your approach isn’t working or you need to change your style to suit the environment.
The implication of this framing is that leaders really need to make sure there is a clear vision/goal/outcome/mission for the _cares_ people to organize around. They also may need to recognize that most people unfortunately don’t care about their work or their contribution to society beyond raising their children and consuming, and that’s fine/not likely to change.
For people who care, then, the task is to recruit/organize the people in the organization to help avoid counterproductive work, and nudge things in the right direction.
(And of course, like nearly all categorizations of complex human systems into binary, my categorization is just a concept to organize thought, not an assertion of truth; people are fluid and drift between and sit on a spectrum between those categories)
The mission is normally the same: to make the founders very rich. Everything feeds into that with a layer of “we better be reasonably good to staff because its hard to attract and retain talent”.
When there isn’t supply/demand on your side then as a worker you end up like the factory workers who have to work through a tornado.
My caring comes from pride in my work and intrinsic motivation mostly, not from the mission of the company. The mission after all is to make people rich.
Thats why i find bonuses weird. A bonus is based on a metric, and that metric is probably gameable. Share of revenue is probably best if you want to pay a bonus. Or just increase salaries.
Stop clarifying people this way. It's not useful, it's not insightfully. I have seen coworkers fighting for one thing but not another. One fights against bad work ethics, another for good tech and another one for their own right too be with his family. People is complex, everything comes in gradients and that changes as people grows and they learn and their lives change.
If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
Author seems to be just written some intelligent sounding thing seemingly inspired by *Capital in the 21st Century*
> look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
Isn't psychology famously pseudoscience as well, given almost all of their studies are irreproducible.
No part of this article is intended to mislead you into thinking it's scientific or technical in nature. It is one person's opinion and they are sharing it and there's nothing wrong with that. You can disagree, agree, share your own insights, but calling it pseudoscience is uncalled for.
>If you are interested look for some real course in psychology and learn from there.
There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of consensus on this and most other subjects, as well as an inability to reproduce a substantial portion of research. Take two different psychology courses related to what the author is discussing and you'll come away with two very different understandings.
Finally I would like to distinguish psychology from psychiatry, as the two are often lumped together, unfairly so.
You are right, this is just bullshit. It does not pretend to be a scientific study, I over interpreted what it was saying.
> There is very little that one can learn from psychology (with respect to this topic) as psychology lacks a great deal of consensus on this and most other subjects
That is a reason to beware of some random opinion, assertiveness does not need to correlate with reason. That this text is assertive does not make it valuable. I see no more learning that people will categorize others in search of a simplicity that is not there. As I said, it's not insightful in any way, it just simplifies to make people feel smart and think that they understand some truth that is no there.
"Things are complicated" gets thrown against every opinion that people don't like. Not saying anything is wisdom. God forbid anybody has any opinion and may God strike him down if he ever supports anything but tabula rasa.
Things got done before studies existed, you know. People built models from intuition and tested them in practice. Or observed patterns. But that's the old wrong ways, right? We publish something on a piece of paper now and unless a committee publishes it and calls it a study it can't be true. And if they do it's true and will remain this way forever, right?
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Blog posts etc. obviously don't need to be scientific studies and there's nothing wrong with people posting them here if they're interesting. HN is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal or conference.
I've noticed that there's a group that wouldn't have a question but would phrase their monologue to seem like a question.
Was Baudrillard's point essentially that capitalism is always the "main" function (hee hee) in the outer scope with everything else becoming subroutines/subprocesses/etc. of it? E.g., "Revolutionary" here is merely a local variable to a function do_capitalism_more_efficiently, rather than itself being a global variable in its own right.
I mean, I get that Baudrillard was essentially focusing on certain edge cases: e.g., where function challenge_capitalism was in fact running in a VM that was spun up by function do_capitalism_more_efficiently. But with that caveat, is there anything important I'm missing from his writing with my analogies to scope here?
Even accepting his premise of Rs vs Es, this seems absurdly short-sighed. Engineers come and go, engineers can change their R/E approach over time or based on project. If you feel like you can't manage a team full of Rs - and decide to hire a less talented E for balance - then the problem is the way you manage. Take ownership of your employees and find ways to use their talents, don't throw your hands up and hire for some personality type that you imagine you've sussed out over a set of one hour interviews.
I guess it takes some calibration to know when it’s the time to be the jerk, but there are times it’s definitely necessary.
Mid article though, it says
> That’s because organizations tend to become more bureaucratic, political and consensus-driven as they grow.
Is this somehow ever a good thing? Largely, all of those things just seem bad. Luxuries of inefficiency a product can enjoy only once it works itself into dominant/monopoly position where it’s bankrolling becomes secure.
The groups I’ve moved away from over the years (often with other revolutionaries moving on as well), became more evolutionary. And all of them have basically devolved into product lines on life support, the “evolutionary” employees left behind don’t understand why management won’t invest in them and would rather buy up competitive offerings to remain relevant.
Hot take: a big part of the utility of these "mature" companies in society is to serve as a kind of glorified daycare for adults. The people they employ can feel like they're contributing something to society, and legitimately earning the money they're bringing home, even if a bird's eye view would reveal that they're just treading water and not really producing any net benefit. This allows the employees to feel better about themselves than they would if the government just handed them a UBI paycheck and sent them back to playing videogames all day.
I've seen a lot of turmoil between people who are legitimately trying to make the world a better place through their work (spoiler: it wasn't always me), and coworkers that prefer to just operate in daycare mode.
On-topic, I think its a natural evolution for organizations to stagnate and calcify unless there is a fundamental recreation. Lots of things could be cherry-picked here for anecdata (Roman Republic, Roman Empire, General Electric, <insert fortune 100 company here>)
I don't think that's bad. You wouldn't want an innovative person being your line cook at a restaurant -- you want the innovative person to be the chef. We also don't want the laws governing the countries we live in to violently change. Systemic, evolutionary, progress is good.
The challenge is figuring out a balance and what to do to prevent the organization from calcifying (becoming product lines on life support), prevent it from throwing away what makes the organization good (chasing the next big thing), and continue to let the organization innovate and thrive (stay relevant) without being eaten.
'A' players hire 'A' players.
'B' players hire 'C' players.
Independent of Revolutionary vs. Evolutionary, we have pure intelligence, education, and animal cunning. An 'A' player has all those, and moreover knows when a Revolutionary strategy is required, and when it's not.
A 'B' player tends to be Evolutionary, because it's safer, but occasionally he'll say "me, too!" to a Revolutionary if it seems to advance his career.
An 'A' player can recognize another one. That's all he or she wants to hire.
A 'B' player is bewildered and threatened by an 'A" player, and moreover, the 'A' player wants nothing to do with him. So he wants to hire someone who's safe and no threat to his tenuous position: the 'C' player.
After the startup is successful, the 'B' managers flood it with their resumes. They like a safe bet. Once they get in and start hiring their own, it's all over.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
Everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse—this is more or less a hardwired perception, or at least difficult to extricate from. If people use that as a basis for how they respond to others, we're guaranteed a downward spiral. That's what we're trying to avoid in this forum, that's why we have the site guidelines, and that's why the guidelines don't depend on how other commenters are behaving.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=downward%20spiral%20by:dang&da...
If A players could recognize another one, our industry's hiring wouldn't be so incredibly broken.
The idea that there are clear layers of engineering skill is... just plain wrong, and that's obvious to anyone who's worked on more than a few teams. It's a spectrum, and more, it's multidimensional. So is the idea that somehow people not in the top layer automatically hire worse people. I've worked with top skilled people (think "starting an entire new segment") who couldn't hire their way out of a wet paper bag. I've work with solid performers who weren't outstanding in any way, except they consistently hired excellent people.
I've also worked with people who were mediocre performers by themselves, but who significantly accelerated any team they were on. Not by visible output, but by being clearly necessary "glue" that bound the team closer together and helped people to shine.
I've seen superstars go to mediocre, and vice versa, just based on managers and or team they were on.
If you can't think about people in more subtle ways than "A,B,C" or "Revolutionaries vs Evolutionaries", you are significantly shortchanging yourself and your team.
Since you've alluded to your experiences: I've picked a startup based only on their business description, where I didn't know a single person, and it IPO'ed in about 18 months. Then the 'B' players flooded in, and some other unrelated stuff happened. What have you done?
I'd say you gotta use many metrics, the simpler they are the more metrics you'd need. simple metrics ignore the subtelties which can make or break.
I think when outside "experts" come in and talk to you, they have one Summary slide at the end that gives their own "simple metrics" and that's what everyone remembers anyway.
Anybody can do that once. If you could do it a hundred times in a row, or develop a science of picking startups, I might be more inclined to believe you.
Let's review: the original article was a bit of pop psychology, like almost all "management science." I replied with some of my own. None of this is a double-blind, peer-reviewed study, and even if it were, it probably wouldn't be replicable, as others have pointed out.
groby_b then replied with some high-sounding condescension, puffing himself up: "our industry's hiring wouldn't be so incredibly broken" via all the incredible things he's seen. Except he didn't use any overt insults -- just passive aggressiveness.
Things went downhill from there.
Sure.
I've worked on DIS. I've worked on industrial automation. I've worked on AAA games. Yes, I've been on (successful) startups as well. Yes, I've consulted, too. I've worked on the European space program. I'm currently responsible for a good-sized engineering org.
I'm in this business for something like 30+ years now. And based on all those experiences, I'm fairly certain that your simplistic approach will bite you, your team, your project at some point. I'm also fairly certain that you'll protest that strenuously until it happens. So, godspeed, and may the experience not be too painful.
You invested in a company and profited by it. That's all that tells us. B can follow A, it doesn't follow that A caused B.
I see this in finance all the time. Traders perform so inconsistently at long timeframes, no better than chance, but think their training—domain knowledge—gives them systems knowledge. Systems are more than the sum of their parts or the individual actions of agents.
Boxing people into USDA grades like flesh is only ever constraining and I don't think the abstraction here collapses any uncertainty in exchange.
They’re the B players who suck up to wealth holders.
Are there A players? Everyone gets a handout at some point. The ultra rich get one in the form of no taxes. An A player would surely just be a billionaire.
Sure is easy being an A player when your handouts from decades ago earned a lot of interest.
How are we still this oblivious? We spent the last decade making building these things this easy on purpose.
Where is the A game in using the machine how it was intended?
People are not static; they're not just their genes, and they're not just a grade. You said you're an A player, why don't we compare your hiring to a random selection of hiring managers with similar experience in your field?
My degree was in Integrative Neuroscience and I'd caution people against these "just so!" explanations. A good narrative is often more convincing than the correct one.
Once you start trying to codify potential or current employees into buckets delineated by simplistic and frankly silly metrics and not by the value they produce in a given set of domains and contexts, then you've already lost the game.
It's just a (sometimes) useful way of thinking about top executives, who mostly can be assigned grades. Engineers are too complex to be divided that way.
As for me: yes, some A players did decide I could be useful. I think I was, as an engineer, and they thought so too. On hiring people: the record was more mixed; some good and some not so great.
If we look at any personality type system, the revolutionary/reformers are going to be a quadrant of discrete personalities (and even those can be broken down or treated as a gradient).
As an easy example, I'm one of the types in that quadrant. While I tend to be independent and self confident, I'm not "an inspiring leader". I also have a strong preference for consensus (or at least peaceful agreement), and prefer not being the center of attention.
Please give this piece about as much attention as you would todays horoscope and instead read a few good papers on pubmed.
The article comes across like "R" and "E" are set characteristics--almost like a personality trait. I'd really like to longitudinal see data on R/E mobility, and how fluidity between R/E types might be related to team cohesion overall.