Managing high performers? Step one: pay them what they're worth.
With the reliable incompetence of the average job, we shouldn't ever expect this kind of rational fair compensation. Really, we should be seeing truly talented people making an exodus away from what is called a socially appropriate job. Due to there being a gross monopoly, right now, on economic resources (led by the dictatorship of midwits).
Many high performing people receive great compensation, at least in financially flush fields like technology, and maximizing compensation isn't everyone's game. In fact, I'd say that high performers are often less distracted by that than most.
What keeps a sufficiently paid high performer around, usually, is a personally rewarding and comfortable work environment. What that means can vary quite a lot though, making it hard to summarize in blogspam and short comments.
I'll second this. Most of the top performers I know, at any given time, could probably double their salary if they really wanted to. I know I could almost certainly by moving from a nimble smaller company that treats me with respect and responsibility (and a lot of fun problems) to one of the big tech companies.
Yeah, I don't understand these sort of hot takes in the articles like it. As said middle-management dimwit, isn't sort of the definition of a high performer is that they perform without much coaching? That doesn't mean lack of management as the article implies - it means setting them up for success.
Set them on a task, give them a few constraints as needed, and act as a bulldozer to remove blockers as they come to you with them. That's roughly the management a high performer needs in my book. Make sure you listen to them when they complain about something, and fix it within reason. Or explain why you cannot. Don't let penny wise pound foolish stuff fester. Advocate for merit based raises and bonuses - they are making you look good so they should be your first priority when expending political capital. Make sure higher ups and the rest of the org knows about their accomplishments. Simple stuff!
I am not aware of any role in tech (or really anywhere in wage labor) where people are being paid what they are worth. Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.
So I'd say, pay us all what we are worth, and pay the high performers proportionally more.
> Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.
In our specific industry, innumerable people are earning high compensation as part of companies and teams that have relatively little revenue (if any) and may very well collapse before turning a profit. Should they not be paid until their work actually makes some money? What if it doesn't?
"Worth" is pretty tricky in salaries, but tech workers happen to have very very little to complain about when it comes to compensation right now. The labor fight for them (us) is real but exists almost entirely on other fronts.
A person’s worth is magnified by the company as well. A software developer’s work is worth less without a salesperson who can sell that work, and vice versa.
You forgot to calculate risk. Wages have to be paid even when the company loses money, and before it makes any from your work. And it has to be paid even if you did a bad job. And in many places, they can't get rid of you for a long time even if you keep doing a bad job or practically no job at all. And when they finally can get rid of you, it's probably going to cost some more money.
Just become a shareholder, share the upside and share the downside. Don't have the balls? Be an employee, get a nice risk-free sum every month and live a worry-free life.
(Yeah I know being an employee isn't entirely without worries, but it's nothing compared to being a founder/shareholder.)
It's much easier to become a shareholder than to become an employee. Today it takes about an hour, you can do it online, and you need just 50 EUR. Of course, the real trick is in making profit - and now it's up to you to show how invaluable and company-making-or-breaking your skills are - as they should be if you're asking for the full upside.
Can't do it? Then you have to share with sales, marketing, accounting, tax consultants, finance, auditors, lawyers, internal IT, HR, post-sales account managers, customer support, office managers, other engineers - and of course the people who keep it organized, and the people who took a risk and funded it. Seems fair to me.
Consider the opportunity cost of providing capital: if I invested my capital into NASDAQ100 accumulating ETF, I could reasonably expect 10-15% of yearly tax-free[0] profit stored in a safe asset that can be liquidated at any time. Potentially much more profit - last few years were great (20-40% p.a.). You have to give me more if you want me to risk my capital in a custom illiquid and unregulated over the counter deal, and I mean a lot more.
[0] In my country if you hold an asset for 3 years, you don't pay capital gains tax - this doesn't apply to dividends or any other form of income such as interest or rent. But the accumulating ETFs are fully tax free after 3 years - including the dividends and the gains. You just sell when you need money, no need to "reinvest" manually.
Yes, they can - stock can be part of compensation. I'm sure almost any company would happily pay you in stock rather than in cash. And buying isn't the only way of becoming a shareholder, especially in software.
I co-founded my first startup when I was 16, as soon as I reached the lower age limit for being a company shareholder in the UK - I'm not from the UK, but I wanted it and so I found a way. If a 16 year old kid with acne and 300 euro in their wallet can do it, any adult professional can.
Yeah it's a load of risk, you work crazy hours, the stress is insane and sometimes you end up paying instead of earning - so don't be surprised that nobody will share the upside if you don't share the risk. It's not for everyone. But anyone can, if they actually wanted.
I remember when I was 18, trying to earn my way through college, scrounging by on less than minimum wage because I was paid under the table. Living in a flat with 8 other people to make the rent math work.
Foolish me for not just becoming a shareholder. I definitely had the spare time between the $7k/year I was making to take that risk and not die of starvation.
Your world would be great if I had a guarantee of food, water, a bed, basic medicine, etc. I'd love to have had the ability to throw my time at a risky innovative project. But, I didn't. If I had, and that project failed, I would have literally died. Downsides are too big in this capitalist world for anyone to just become a shareholder.
Yeah, as I said, it's definitely not for everyone. I skipped school because I wanted to do business. Sometimes I didn't have enough food, at the beginning. I had to buy (very) used instead of new. I lived at the far end of the city and I didn't really go anywhere because I didn't have enough money for bus tickets. A lot of sacrifice - and now someone comes and wants to have all of it without any sacrifice. I agree the world can be improved and your suggestions are what I have in mind too. But imho it's off topic to this conversation.
You said that you want to get all profit you made for the company - that's only possible if it's your company. If you don't want that, that's fine - but don't say the option isn't available.
The market is not an organization, the market is a disorganization—except in the case of a monopoly/monopsony, in which case intervention is desirable.
Nobody said that the market is some organization, it's a way of organizing people, and it happens naturally. It's not something you invent, create and maintain, it's something you discover and observe - and try to control, often in vain or with unintended consequences, like weather. There was a market long before anybody thought of the word - and it was one of the first words. The oldest known written text is not some religious fluff or descriptions of market-less utopia, it's a "warranty claim" about a shipment of copper.
My point was that the word organization implies a planned structure, and a free market is explicitly not that. I'd consider it fair to say a market is a way of humans self-organizing, but a market is not an organization in any common sense of the word.
"Organization" (verb) doesn't necessarily result in "an organization" and almost definitely not in something "optimally organized". Your brain is organized and yet nobody planned it and it's definitely not an organization.
I also disagree that "an organization" (noun) implies anything other than "a group of people" as described in dictionary. An organization can exist without any planned structure - doesn't stop it from being an organization. In my teenage years I was part of few "hacker" groups (in the HN sense of the word) - we tinkered with computers and had a website with cool stuff, all under our 1337 H4X0R-esque name and logo. We definitely were an organization, but we really didn't plan any structure at all. We just liked tech.
The capitalist market system is really only a few hundred years old! If you believe Meiksins Wood, she puts it at about the mid 1700s, others put it a little later.
And even then, it took quite some time to reach the rest of the globe.
We've had non-capitalist market economies, anarchist economies, communist economies (of various flavors), gift economies, and many other ways of organizing people.
Ask the folks who run Food Not Bombs about whether they are 'organized by the market'. :D
"The market" doesn't imply "the capitalist market system". Yes, the current structure of world economy started forming around that time. There was market since pre-history and will be long after Earth is dust.
That’s great when what they want to do is aligned with what the organization needs. It’s essentially not-managing.
The issue is, many times high performers just aren’t aligned with what needs doing, and by not-managing them, inexperienced managers create a world where you have tons of “high performance” arriving absolutely nowhere. You see this at every bloated organization (in particular at big tech).
I’ve got a high performer on my team and I do think (okay, wouldn’t I ;) that in managing speed vs quality and explicit attention to the learning curve of others I’ve managed to create a few more golden nuggets. No high performer (perhaps: nobody, ever) has all professional skills in the same measure.
I'm convinced real coaching doesn't exist. I don't think I've ever had real coaching. I've even requested additional coaching as a medical accommodation. It's just additional low quality feedback. There's no focus on growth or improvement.
I have no doubt that I'm not living up to my potential. I don't see any way to get there given my disability and lack of real coaching.
Coaching exists. I've had it and done it. I've worked with folks with disabilities too and been able to help them grow.
The problem is that companies often promote folks with excellent technical skills into people centric roles like an EM. Sometimes you get lucky and they are naturally good at the stuff. But more often than not, they really struggle. It's a conundrum. If you hire someone who nails it on the people stuff but is weaker on the technical side then they aren't able to make informed decisions.
I've been head of eng before. It's a hard job and I ultimately switched jobs to go back to IC work. I took the coaching aspect seriously when I was in the role though. I think ultimately you need to understand what your report wants and give them projects, feedback, and resources to achieve those goals. The big caveat being that sometimes the role that person is looking for isn't available. You can't have an entire team of principle engineers for example. So another aspect is to be clear about what is and isn't possible in terms of career path at your co. and try to find other incentives like pay etc to keep them happy. YMMV of course.
Hah, know what you mean. I'm ADHD and also incapable of entertaining bureaucracy. My personal solution to the bureaucracy and lack of perceived mentorship in our industry was just to work in small teams, startups, cultivating executive skill so that the number of people I have to argue with decreases.
I mentor a few juniors and CS students outside of work and it's rewarding, but it frequently makes me wish I had a mentor of my own as well, ideally someone with ADHD who could give me specific advice. I guess all we can do is be the change we want to see in the world, and to stay vigilant against bureaucratic systems.
My advice is to figure out exactly where you want to be and make no compromises on getting there. It can be difficult navigating politics with ASD, but over time it can become one of your greatest assets as you pay more attention to it than the average person. I know this seems like a vague generality, but without knowing specifics all I can offer is general advice.
That's probably in part because mid-level management (like me) didn't get promoted to that role because we are great coaches. I spend the vast majority of my time putting out fires, protecting the team from bullshit, making offerings to the audit monster and running the corporate HR playbook. I probably spend an hour a month for each of my 15 directs really trying to think how to help them improve their skills and advance their career.
I've noticed this too. If you want to get better, you're basically responsible for doing it in your own time. Using work time for unproductive learning seems frowned on and punished.
One thing that is not in the article is the fact that high performing people are often asked to do things that aren't part of their job description and for which there is no time in their timetable.
As someone who is currently in that role I expect my managers to know where the limits lie and defend them against other higher ups, departments etc. And that means there should never be a long period of over-straining these resources.
Some good advice here but contains (paraphrasing) "Always ask them for more".
Why not help them find and keep balance? We get to be excellent because we care and want to do the work well. Always mindlessly pushing for more is advocating for burning out your best people. Yes we want to grow but sometimes we need rest and further, that rest and proper balance is key to getting the best results.
Sarcasm aside, this can actually lead to situations where most people just rely on the “savior” and don’t grow to the level they should. Very common problem, and you only realize it after the high performers leaves
This is one case where I agree, and I'd even argue that a person who acts as "the savior" in this fashion is not as high a performer as they would seem, since they're introducing a negative productivity multiplier to their coworkers. The best advice you can ever give to a high productivity person is to create a barrier of resistance to helping others. When someone comes to me for help, I always ask what they've tried and let them work through the solution, because if I do it myself, they'll never learn and in the future my productivity will suffer since I have to spend more time helping them on things a junior or mid-level should be capable of doing.
When someone comes to me with a blocker, I help them get unblocked if I can make the time.
This means that my duties as CTO or lead might be more spread out, that I have to work extra hours to feel like I'm getting enough personal coding time after factoring in administrative work, but it's worth it for me because my entire team moves faster and writes more robust software.
Unblocking someone doesn't mean doing someone's work for them, it means being a mentor, understanding their problem, and providing surgical assistance while also teaching them the same process you used to arrive at the solution.
I've had coworkers push back on this style before, opting sooner to fire employees for not immediately being key players. Meanwhile, I've cultivated some tight-knit teams where everyone is in sync and motivated to work and assist one another, regardless of skill level. Over time, the culture matures and the team is capable of managing more problems on their own.
Asking for help != asking the other person to do it
I completely agree that when the high performer jumps to “let me just do it” it creates a negative multiplier to the team as most of the work will be only understandable by that one person and the rest of the team can do less than one unit of work.
Which is why it is very important for high performers to either know how to work in a team, or be assigned work where they can just do their things on their own.
I can tell you've never been reprimanded for being a blocker, when management sides with the people asking ridiculous learned helplessness questions, instead of learning how to help themselves. Bully for you, but just be aware that not everyone works for people this understanding.
This is the correct take. Another way I like to think of this is you actually really just have a bus factor of 1 spread across the whole org if you need the high performing savior to step in and actually get things done.
The article assumes that managers of software high performers have the same quality as Tiger Wood's coach. Nothing is further from the truth.
In general, I feel that the article is geared towards making the high performer work harder and ignoring his often legitimate complaints. It does not address the question why high performers sometimes get irritable. The reasons can range from people intriguing against them with lies to being underappreciated.
"Cutting off the oxygen" is a one-sided and primitive measure.
> and ignoring his often legitimate complaints. It does not address the question why high performers sometimes get irritable. The reasons can range from people intriguing against them with lies to being underappreciated.
This one stuck out at me too. We now have "architect" roles, and one of them was assigned to our group, having never even looked at our legacy codebases before, and during a meeting my response to what he wanted was pretty close to what's in this post - "that doesn't make sense / isn't a good idea". I didn't have a good on-the-spot explanation at that moment, it came from years of experience working with this legacy system, that I had to later figure out how to summarize all of that and put that intuition into words.
Even the best performers need structure and guidance - a coach. Without coaching, high performers can meet all sorts of suboptimal fates…
Why don’t tech companies generally employ coaches? Yes you can get an “executive” coach, but not widely and really depends on the culture for the perceived purpose. Coaches aren’t widely available for helping people using (and not abusing) their brain’s gifts every day.
From my own experience as a high performer: don't bullshit them, and be upfront when you are parroting required HR talking points.
Worse than anything else in TFA is insulting my intelligence, especially when it comes to career advancement. That's why I left a job I'd been at for quite a long time. The company suddenly decided to gamble that I didn't know the difference between inflation and core inflation.
I guess it depends on what you mean by less capable. I've had great managers that had pretty negligible technical skills but they were able to provide me with good direction and made sure that I wasn't wasting my time on work that didn't matter. And on the flip side I've had bosses that were way better at my job than I was but they were not at all fun to work for, for a variety of reasons.
Some of my best managers weren't really as technical as I was, or were experts in completely different domains.
The job of a manager isn't being a "better developer", it's to remove blockers and isolate reports from annoyances, so that they can do their best work.
I disagree. Sports gives lots of great examples... the all-time greats almost always fail as coaches. But great coaches often come from the ranks of the less successful players and get more out of the greats. I've seen the same over and over in software engineering.
Nobody, not even the best, is perfect. Even if they are perfect today, things constantly change, and they need to grow to accommodate change. A good manager will have different context (e.g., from being in more meetings than high performers have capacity for) and be able to synthesize information for them. They will see what is working for other high performers more deeply and share that. They will be a good sounding board. They will be someone who can listen. They will be someone who will be honest about what they are seeing. And they will know when to get themselves and others out of the way.
Also, part of being a great high performer is learning how to collaborate with a manager on growth. A manager can't do nearly as much to help if the high performer is not being reflective, looking for opportunity, willing to change / grow, and being vulnerable enough with the manager to share all of that. People who are really good at this can get more out of all but the worst managers.
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of terrible managers just getting in the way. But there are great managers too, even those who weren't the highest performers as ICs.
Please look for a little more nuance, I promise that it's there. Almost every NBA player is a high performer compared to the levels below. But many NBA players are not high performers when compared to other NBA players. Almost every professional software engineer is a high performer compared to the levels below. But many professional software engineers are not high performers when compared to the rest of the profession. Why is Steph Curry's salary more than 25x some of his teammates' salaries? The same for LeBron James? There is a distribution of performance within the top level of any profession. Why call out performance at all, in the context of coaching / managing / growth, if it's not relative to others at the same level?
100% no nuance and not comparable. There are millions of engineers and maybe 1000 players in the NBA at any given moment. It’s entirely not comparable if you understand anything about how scale is different.
But you don’t. Like most on this forum these days it’s low
Level Randos commenting with little insight or knowledge
This is a silly idea. Managing is a different skill than performing (at any task). Usain Bolt's coach was not a very fast sprinter. LeBron James' coach at Miami was merely a middling basketball player.
This won't go over well here, but: we might have to dismantle a lot of the economy if we want to fix draining overproducers until you can discard them...
That's only true if you expect managers to control the people they lead. Another approach is to empower them instead. As a manager my expectation is that each of my direct reports eventually grows to be better at their job than I am at their job. My job is to make sure they have clarity on the team and organizational goals, make sure my management has visibility and confidence in our team, and create a healthy, high trust environment that allows my team members to work at their best. Again, it is my hope and desire that my reports exceed my own expertise. Additionally, management is itself a different skillset.
You likely again have never seen a true high performer and are confusing them for high output.
High performers will be good enough to fundamentally question leadership decisions at an exec level and will have good reasons to. They will not just he fast at their work. They will be so good at it that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation.
High output just does the work you assign them well.
Not who you are responding to here, but I'd put the bar for the highest level of performance significantly higher than that. Any good engineer can "fundamentally question leadership decisions at an exec level". True top performs do it and cause change to happen at that level. I've seen plenty just question and not realize how much (typically non-technical) context they are missing. I've seen multiple ICs regularly effect change at that level and be thanked personally by CEOs and CFOs in multi-billion dollar public companies. These are people who have >50% raises because of their company-changing results (one person had that kind of raise in consecutive companies). These are exceptionally high performers by any standard.
I've managed multiple people like that and had them request weekly one-on-ones with me years after I retired (I gladly do it because they are amazing to talk with). I was a highly successful IC for almost 25 years, but nowhere near their level. It turns out some people can coach / manage / mentor well above their own levels.
I mention all that because my style had a lot in common with who you are responding to. Nowhere did they say that their reports get 1% ahead of their own abilities and stop there - there is no ceiling.
> You likely again have never seen a true high performer
I'm not sure why you think you know what everyone else has experienced. Isn't it possible that your experience is less than universal?
Theres generally no room for "high performance" in large corporations like Amazon and Google. There is room for getting work done quickly and to spec, but that's different than high output creative problem solving. The value in many businesses is that they have compartmentalized employees into high output replaceable cogs. High performing employees outside of startups and "innovation teams" are a risk to a business
It's also a lot harder to recognize high performance at these companies because of the natural impediments to getting anything done. If you aren't on the right project, or if your leadership doesn't understand/advocate for your work, or if you're just constantly churning through reorgs, etc. Large complex systems breed large complex bureaucracies to manage them and the skills to understand and manipulate one don't necessarily translate to the other.
I’m at a FAANG right now and this couldn’t be further from the truth.
We basically bought out a ton of A- to A+ players from the rest of the industry and there are many high performers developing entire modules of core functionality themselves with a team of juniors and contractors supporting them. I also have a hunch they make $350-$750k.
Didn't they make John Carmack leave? Obviously I do not know Meta's internal projects, but the open source ones often have a poor quality and the main metric appears to be LOC (or KLOC in the case of those geniuses).
It can even be seen from the outside if you observe the actual output of high ranking Googlers in open source projects and compare that with their status at Google.
Some are just nasty politicians that produce neither quality nor quantity.
People lower down on the ranks never realize that this is going on. They also have no exposure to what people are like higher up, and how much of it is bullshit politics
Understand what they value as an individual: compensation, work life balance or interesting work can all be valued by top talent and it often depends where they are in life.
But first, we have to argue about our own individual interpretations of what a "high performer is", and then justify our belief that it is every single one of us, because-
Managing high performers? Step one: pay them what they're worth.
With the reliable incompetence of the average job, we shouldn't ever expect this kind of rational fair compensation. Really, we should be seeing truly talented people making an exodus away from what is called a socially appropriate job. Due to there being a gross monopoly, right now, on economic resources (led by the dictatorship of midwits).
Many high performing people receive great compensation, at least in financially flush fields like technology, and maximizing compensation isn't everyone's game. In fact, I'd say that high performers are often less distracted by that than most.
What keeps a sufficiently paid high performer around, usually, is a personally rewarding and comfortable work environment. What that means can vary quite a lot though, making it hard to summarize in blogspam and short comments.
I'll second this. Most of the top performers I know, at any given time, could probably double their salary if they really wanted to. I know I could almost certainly by moving from a nimble smaller company that treats me with respect and responsibility (and a lot of fun problems) to one of the big tech companies.
Agree 1000%. I'd take less pay to not have to deal with some middle-management dimwit who read this article trying to actively "coach" me.
Yeah, I don't understand these sort of hot takes in the articles like it. As said middle-management dimwit, isn't sort of the definition of a high performer is that they perform without much coaching? That doesn't mean lack of management as the article implies - it means setting them up for success.
Set them on a task, give them a few constraints as needed, and act as a bulldozer to remove blockers as they come to you with them. That's roughly the management a high performer needs in my book. Make sure you listen to them when they complain about something, and fix it within reason. Or explain why you cannot. Don't let penny wise pound foolish stuff fester. Advocate for merit based raises and bonuses - they are making you look good so they should be your first priority when expending political capital. Make sure higher ups and the rest of the org knows about their accomplishments. Simple stuff!
That article advocates for paying them what they are worth, even if it exceeds the salary of higher-ups.
Found the person who actually read the article before commenting.
I am not aware of any role in tech (or really anywhere in wage labor) where people are being paid what they are worth. Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.
So I'd say, pay us all what we are worth, and pay the high performers proportionally more.
> Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.
In our specific industry, innumerable people are earning high compensation as part of companies and teams that have relatively little revenue (if any) and may very well collapse before turning a profit. Should they not be paid until their work actually makes some money? What if it doesn't?
"Worth" is pretty tricky in salaries, but tech workers happen to have very very little to complain about when it comes to compensation right now. The labor fight for them (us) is real but exists almost entirely on other fronts.
that's how equity works.
A person’s worth is magnified by the company as well. A software developer’s work is worth less without a salesperson who can sell that work, and vice versa.
I would characterize this as potential rather than worth.
You forgot to calculate risk. Wages have to be paid even when the company loses money, and before it makes any from your work. And it has to be paid even if you did a bad job. And in many places, they can't get rid of you for a long time even if you keep doing a bad job or practically no job at all. And when they finally can get rid of you, it's probably going to cost some more money.
Just become a shareholder, share the upside and share the downside. Don't have the balls? Be an employee, get a nice risk-free sum every month and live a worry-free life.
(Yeah I know being an employee isn't entirely without worries, but it's nothing compared to being a founder/shareholder.)
> Just become a shareholder
I always forget that all people, regardless of their capital, can "just become a shareholder".
It's much easier to become a shareholder than to become an employee. Today it takes about an hour, you can do it online, and you need just 50 EUR. Of course, the real trick is in making profit - and now it's up to you to show how invaluable and company-making-or-breaking your skills are - as they should be if you're asking for the full upside.
Can't do it? Then you have to share with sales, marketing, accounting, tax consultants, finance, auditors, lawyers, internal IT, HR, post-sales account managers, customer support, office managers, other engineers - and of course the people who keep it organized, and the people who took a risk and funded it. Seems fair to me.
Consider the opportunity cost of providing capital: if I invested my capital into NASDAQ100 accumulating ETF, I could reasonably expect 10-15% of yearly tax-free[0] profit stored in a safe asset that can be liquidated at any time. Potentially much more profit - last few years were great (20-40% p.a.). You have to give me more if you want me to risk my capital in a custom illiquid and unregulated over the counter deal, and I mean a lot more.
[0] In my country if you hold an asset for 3 years, you don't pay capital gains tax - this doesn't apply to dividends or any other form of income such as interest or rent. But the accumulating ETFs are fully tax free after 3 years - including the dividends and the gains. You just sell when you need money, no need to "reinvest" manually.
Yes, they can - stock can be part of compensation. I'm sure almost any company would happily pay you in stock rather than in cash. And buying isn't the only way of becoming a shareholder, especially in software.
I co-founded my first startup when I was 16, as soon as I reached the lower age limit for being a company shareholder in the UK - I'm not from the UK, but I wanted it and so I found a way. If a 16 year old kid with acne and 300 euro in their wallet can do it, any adult professional can.
Yeah it's a load of risk, you work crazy hours, the stress is insane and sometimes you end up paying instead of earning - so don't be surprised that nobody will share the upside if you don't share the risk. It's not for everyone. But anyone can, if they actually wanted.
I remember when I was 18, trying to earn my way through college, scrounging by on less than minimum wage because I was paid under the table. Living in a flat with 8 other people to make the rent math work.
Foolish me for not just becoming a shareholder. I definitely had the spare time between the $7k/year I was making to take that risk and not die of starvation.
Your world would be great if I had a guarantee of food, water, a bed, basic medicine, etc. I'd love to have had the ability to throw my time at a risky innovative project. But, I didn't. If I had, and that project failed, I would have literally died. Downsides are too big in this capitalist world for anyone to just become a shareholder.
Yeah, as I said, it's definitely not for everyone. I skipped school because I wanted to do business. Sometimes I didn't have enough food, at the beginning. I had to buy (very) used instead of new. I lived at the far end of the city and I didn't really go anywhere because I didn't have enough money for bus tickets. A lot of sacrifice - and now someone comes and wants to have all of it without any sacrifice. I agree the world can be improved and your suggestions are what I have in mind too. But imho it's off topic to this conversation.
You said that you want to get all profit you made for the company - that's only possible if it's your company. If you don't want that, that's fine - but don't say the option isn't available.
The market disagrees
Indeed. Thankfully, the market is not the only way of organizing people.
The market is the only way of organizing people, thankfully it doesn't mean much.
(Even non-profits etc are part of the market)
The market is not an organization, the market is a disorganization—except in the case of a monopoly/monopsony, in which case intervention is desirable.
Nobody said that the market is some organization, it's a way of organizing people, and it happens naturally. It's not something you invent, create and maintain, it's something you discover and observe - and try to control, often in vain or with unintended consequences, like weather. There was a market long before anybody thought of the word - and it was one of the first words. The oldest known written text is not some religious fluff or descriptions of market-less utopia, it's a "warranty claim" about a shipment of copper.
My point was that the word organization implies a planned structure, and a free market is explicitly not that. I'd consider it fair to say a market is a way of humans self-organizing, but a market is not an organization in any common sense of the word.
"Organization" (verb) doesn't necessarily result in "an organization" and almost definitely not in something "optimally organized". Your brain is organized and yet nobody planned it and it's definitely not an organization.
I also disagree that "an organization" (noun) implies anything other than "a group of people" as described in dictionary. An organization can exist without any planned structure - doesn't stop it from being an organization. In my teenage years I was part of few "hacker" groups (in the HN sense of the word) - we tinkered with computers and had a website with cool stuff, all under our 1337 H4X0R-esque name and logo. We definitely were an organization, but we really didn't plan any structure at all. We just liked tech.
See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organization
Oh my friend, you have some reading to do!
The capitalist market system is really only a few hundred years old! If you believe Meiksins Wood, she puts it at about the mid 1700s, others put it a little later.
And even then, it took quite some time to reach the rest of the globe.
We've had non-capitalist market economies, anarchist economies, communist economies (of various flavors), gift economies, and many other ways of organizing people.
Ask the folks who run Food Not Bombs about whether they are 'organized by the market'. :D
"The market" doesn't imply "the capitalist market system". Yes, the current structure of world economy started forming around that time. There was market since pre-history and will be long after Earth is dust.
They will never do that. Gaslit high performers are the profit delta of any team.
> Managing high performers? Step one: pay them what they're worth.
Don't forget that no all companies can pay what they're worth... most companies don't.
I managed a person who was more senior than I was, and definitely a top performer.
What did they want me to do?
Get stuff out of their way, so they could move as fast as they were capable of moving.
I was happy to do that, and we had a great relationship.
That’s great when what they want to do is aligned with what the organization needs. It’s essentially not-managing.
The issue is, many times high performers just aren’t aligned with what needs doing, and by not-managing them, inexperienced managers create a world where you have tons of “high performance” arriving absolutely nowhere. You see this at every bloated organization (in particular at big tech).
I’ve got a high performer on my team and I do think (okay, wouldn’t I ;) that in managing speed vs quality and explicit attention to the learning curve of others I’ve managed to create a few more golden nuggets. No high performer (perhaps: nobody, ever) has all professional skills in the same measure.
I'm convinced real coaching doesn't exist. I don't think I've ever had real coaching. I've even requested additional coaching as a medical accommodation. It's just additional low quality feedback. There's no focus on growth or improvement.
I have no doubt that I'm not living up to my potential. I don't see any way to get there given my disability and lack of real coaching.
Coaching exists. I've had it and done it. I've worked with folks with disabilities too and been able to help them grow.
The problem is that companies often promote folks with excellent technical skills into people centric roles like an EM. Sometimes you get lucky and they are naturally good at the stuff. But more often than not, they really struggle. It's a conundrum. If you hire someone who nails it on the people stuff but is weaker on the technical side then they aren't able to make informed decisions.
I've been head of eng before. It's a hard job and I ultimately switched jobs to go back to IC work. I took the coaching aspect seriously when I was in the role though. I think ultimately you need to understand what your report wants and give them projects, feedback, and resources to achieve those goals. The big caveat being that sometimes the role that person is looking for isn't available. You can't have an entire team of principle engineers for example. So another aspect is to be clear about what is and isn't possible in terms of career path at your co. and try to find other incentives like pay etc to keep them happy. YMMV of course.
That's annoying. What do you feel you're struggling with? What's your disability?
Basically, politics. ASD.
Hah, know what you mean. I'm ADHD and also incapable of entertaining bureaucracy. My personal solution to the bureaucracy and lack of perceived mentorship in our industry was just to work in small teams, startups, cultivating executive skill so that the number of people I have to argue with decreases.
I mentor a few juniors and CS students outside of work and it's rewarding, but it frequently makes me wish I had a mentor of my own as well, ideally someone with ADHD who could give me specific advice. I guess all we can do is be the change we want to see in the world, and to stay vigilant against bureaucratic systems.
My advice is to figure out exactly where you want to be and make no compromises on getting there. It can be difficult navigating politics with ASD, but over time it can become one of your greatest assets as you pay more attention to it than the average person. I know this seems like a vague generality, but without knowing specifics all I can offer is general advice.
> I'm convinced real coaching doesn't exist.
Aristotle would disagree.
That's probably in part because mid-level management (like me) didn't get promoted to that role because we are great coaches. I spend the vast majority of my time putting out fires, protecting the team from bullshit, making offerings to the audit monster and running the corporate HR playbook. I probably spend an hour a month for each of my 15 directs really trying to think how to help them improve their skills and advance their career.
I've noticed this too. If you want to get better, you're basically responsible for doing it in your own time. Using work time for unproductive learning seems frowned on and punished.
Who defines what "better" is?
Whoever has the power to fire you.
So it's always changing
One thing that is not in the article is the fact that high performing people are often asked to do things that aren't part of their job description and for which there is no time in their timetable.
As someone who is currently in that role I expect my managers to know where the limits lie and defend them against other higher ups, departments etc. And that means there should never be a long period of over-straining these resources.
This is where I see most people burning out and leaving.
At my company we recently had three product managers leaving because they were forced to do someone else's job.
Some good advice here but contains (paraphrasing) "Always ask them for more".
Why not help them find and keep balance? We get to be excellent because we care and want to do the work well. Always mindlessly pushing for more is advocating for burning out your best people. Yes we want to grow but sometimes we need rest and further, that rest and proper balance is key to getting the best results.
Most companies are happy to keep taking without additional compensation.
Of course, and if you ask for too much you get less.
"they just float around and help people" heaven forbid
That's a huge risk for the company: if you let them do that for long enough, they may help other employees become high performers as well! /s
Sarcasm aside, this can actually lead to situations where most people just rely on the “savior” and don’t grow to the level they should. Very common problem, and you only realize it after the high performers leaves
It really depends on what "help people" means.
It's one thing to mentor, pair, give advice, review PRs, review designs.
It's a very different thing when you have high performers jumping in to finish someone else's work all the time.
And IME: most companies prefer #2, because it's faster. Bus factor be damned.
This is one case where I agree, and I'd even argue that a person who acts as "the savior" in this fashion is not as high a performer as they would seem, since they're introducing a negative productivity multiplier to their coworkers. The best advice you can ever give to a high productivity person is to create a barrier of resistance to helping others. When someone comes to me for help, I always ask what they've tried and let them work through the solution, because if I do it myself, they'll never learn and in the future my productivity will suffer since I have to spend more time helping them on things a junior or mid-level should be capable of doing.
When someone comes to me with a blocker, I help them get unblocked if I can make the time.
This means that my duties as CTO or lead might be more spread out, that I have to work extra hours to feel like I'm getting enough personal coding time after factoring in administrative work, but it's worth it for me because my entire team moves faster and writes more robust software.
Unblocking someone doesn't mean doing someone's work for them, it means being a mentor, understanding their problem, and providing surgical assistance while also teaching them the same process you used to arrive at the solution.
I've had coworkers push back on this style before, opting sooner to fire employees for not immediately being key players. Meanwhile, I've cultivated some tight-knit teams where everyone is in sync and motivated to work and assist one another, regardless of skill level. Over time, the culture matures and the team is capable of managing more problems on their own.
Asking for help != asking the other person to do it
I completely agree that when the high performer jumps to “let me just do it” it creates a negative multiplier to the team as most of the work will be only understandable by that one person and the rest of the team can do less than one unit of work.
Which is why it is very important for high performers to either know how to work in a team, or be assigned work where they can just do their things on their own.
I can tell you've never been reprimanded for being a blocker, when management sides with the people asking ridiculous learned helplessness questions, instead of learning how to help themselves. Bully for you, but just be aware that not everyone works for people this understanding.
This is the correct take. Another way I like to think of this is you actually really just have a bus factor of 1 spread across the whole org if you need the high performing savior to step in and actually get things done.
The article assumes that managers of software high performers have the same quality as Tiger Wood's coach. Nothing is further from the truth.
In general, I feel that the article is geared towards making the high performer work harder and ignoring his often legitimate complaints. It does not address the question why high performers sometimes get irritable. The reasons can range from people intriguing against them with lies to being underappreciated.
"Cutting off the oxygen" is a one-sided and primitive measure.
> and ignoring his often legitimate complaints. It does not address the question why high performers sometimes get irritable. The reasons can range from people intriguing against them with lies to being underappreciated.
This one stuck out at me too. We now have "architect" roles, and one of them was assigned to our group, having never even looked at our legacy codebases before, and during a meeting my response to what he wanted was pretty close to what's in this post - "that doesn't make sense / isn't a good idea". I didn't have a good on-the-spot explanation at that moment, it came from years of experience working with this legacy system, that I had to later figure out how to summarize all of that and put that intuition into words.
Even the best performers need structure and guidance - a coach. Without coaching, high performers can meet all sorts of suboptimal fates…
Why don’t tech companies generally employ coaches? Yes you can get an “executive” coach, but not widely and really depends on the culture for the perceived purpose. Coaches aren’t widely available for helping people using (and not abusing) their brain’s gifts every day.
Probably some kind of worry "but what if we spend our money coaching them... and then they leave?"
The same reason tech companies generally don't spend money training their employees, etc.
I don't need any managing I want the rest of the team to also be high performers and low performers go work in another team
Who’s managing these managers and management article writers is what I want to know
From my own experience as a high performer: don't bullshit them, and be upfront when you are parroting required HR talking points.
Worse than anything else in TFA is insulting my intelligence, especially when it comes to career advancement. That's why I left a job I'd been at for quite a long time. The company suddenly decided to gamble that I didn't know the difference between inflation and core inflation.
Somehow these articles always come across to me as; managers are perfect and those who need to be managed are flawed.
Actual high performers cannot be managed as they eventually will question why a less capable person is managing them.
This is the basic unsolvable quandary everyone ignored at Google during my 10 years there.
What these silly advice columns actually are selling is “how to drain over producers until you can discard them”
I guess it depends on what you mean by less capable. I've had great managers that had pretty negligible technical skills but they were able to provide me with good direction and made sure that I wasn't wasting my time on work that didn't matter. And on the flip side I've had bosses that were way better at my job than I was but they were not at all fun to work for, for a variety of reasons.
Same.
Some of my best managers weren't really as technical as I was, or were experts in completely different domains.
The job of a manager isn't being a "better developer", it's to remove blockers and isolate reports from annoyances, so that they can do their best work.
I disagree. Sports gives lots of great examples... the all-time greats almost always fail as coaches. But great coaches often come from the ranks of the less successful players and get more out of the greats. I've seen the same over and over in software engineering.
Nobody, not even the best, is perfect. Even if they are perfect today, things constantly change, and they need to grow to accommodate change. A good manager will have different context (e.g., from being in more meetings than high performers have capacity for) and be able to synthesize information for them. They will see what is working for other high performers more deeply and share that. They will be a good sounding board. They will be someone who can listen. They will be someone who will be honest about what they are seeing. And they will know when to get themselves and others out of the way.
Also, part of being a great high performer is learning how to collaborate with a manager on growth. A manager can't do nearly as much to help if the high performer is not being reflective, looking for opportunity, willing to change / grow, and being vulnerable enough with the manager to share all of that. People who are really good at this can get more out of all but the worst managers.
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of terrible managers just getting in the way. But there are great managers too, even those who weren't the highest performers as ICs.
Completely false. Almost every NBA player is what you would call a high performer by any metric. And most coaches come from the player base.
You wrote a lot here and got the metaphor entirely wrong at a base level. The NBA is a tournament of entirely high performers.
Please look for a little more nuance, I promise that it's there. Almost every NBA player is a high performer compared to the levels below. But many NBA players are not high performers when compared to other NBA players. Almost every professional software engineer is a high performer compared to the levels below. But many professional software engineers are not high performers when compared to the rest of the profession. Why is Steph Curry's salary more than 25x some of his teammates' salaries? The same for LeBron James? There is a distribution of performance within the top level of any profession. Why call out performance at all, in the context of coaching / managing / growth, if it's not relative to others at the same level?
100% no nuance and not comparable. There are millions of engineers and maybe 1000 players in the NBA at any given moment. It’s entirely not comparable if you understand anything about how scale is different.
But you don’t. Like most on this forum these days it’s low Level Randos commenting with little insight or knowledge
This is a silly idea. Managing is a different skill than performing (at any task). Usain Bolt's coach was not a very fast sprinter. LeBron James' coach at Miami was merely a middling basketball player.
Stop using sports it’s a poor metaphor and by all account's all coaches are high performing formers players themselves.
This is kitchen table economics talk.
Not true theirs is plenty of mediocre players that become great coaches. I really cannot see why IT would be different.
This won't go over well here, but: we might have to dismantle a lot of the economy if we want to fix draining overproducers until you can discard them...
That's only true if you expect managers to control the people they lead. Another approach is to empower them instead. As a manager my expectation is that each of my direct reports eventually grows to be better at their job than I am at their job. My job is to make sure they have clarity on the team and organizational goals, make sure my management has visibility and confidence in our team, and create a healthy, high trust environment that allows my team members to work at their best. Again, it is my hope and desire that my reports exceed my own expertise. Additionally, management is itself a different skillset.
You likely again have never seen a true high performer and are confusing them for high output.
High performers will be good enough to fundamentally question leadership decisions at an exec level and will have good reasons to. They will not just he fast at their work. They will be so good at it that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation.
High output just does the work you assign them well.
Not who you are responding to here, but I'd put the bar for the highest level of performance significantly higher than that. Any good engineer can "fundamentally question leadership decisions at an exec level". True top performs do it and cause change to happen at that level. I've seen plenty just question and not realize how much (typically non-technical) context they are missing. I've seen multiple ICs regularly effect change at that level and be thanked personally by CEOs and CFOs in multi-billion dollar public companies. These are people who have >50% raises because of their company-changing results (one person had that kind of raise in consecutive companies). These are exceptionally high performers by any standard.
I've managed multiple people like that and had them request weekly one-on-ones with me years after I retired (I gladly do it because they are amazing to talk with). I was a highly successful IC for almost 25 years, but nowhere near their level. It turns out some people can coach / manage / mentor well above their own levels.
I mention all that because my style had a lot in common with who you are responding to. Nowhere did they say that their reports get 1% ahead of their own abilities and stop there - there is no ceiling.
> You likely again have never seen a true high performer
I'm not sure why you think you know what everyone else has experienced. Isn't it possible that your experience is less than universal?
High performance experience is by definition not universal. I still doubt you’ve seen it.
I’ve seen hundred million dollar retention packages. Not random engineers getting 100k more because they made a c suite happy once.
Also a x billion dollar company amounts to maybe What a few hundred people.
Come on you’ve not seen the major league even yet.
Theres generally no room for "high performance" in large corporations like Amazon and Google. There is room for getting work done quickly and to spec, but that's different than high output creative problem solving. The value in many businesses is that they have compartmentalized employees into high output replaceable cogs. High performing employees outside of startups and "innovation teams" are a risk to a business
It's also a lot harder to recognize high performance at these companies because of the natural impediments to getting anything done. If you aren't on the right project, or if your leadership doesn't understand/advocate for your work, or if you're just constantly churning through reorgs, etc. Large complex systems breed large complex bureaucracies to manage them and the skills to understand and manipulate one don't necessarily translate to the other.
yeah its a total crapshoot whether things play out correctly or not
I’m at a FAANG right now and this couldn’t be further from the truth.
We basically bought out a ton of A- to A+ players from the rest of the industry and there are many high performers developing entire modules of core functionality themselves with a team of juniors and contractors supporting them. I also have a hunch they make $350-$750k.
Didn't they make John Carmack leave? Obviously I do not know Meta's internal projects, but the open source ones often have a poor quality and the main metric appears to be LOC (or KLOC in the case of those geniuses).
“High performers” in this article mean, to me, something like the 5% best.
John Carmack is not a “high performer.” He’s in the vanishly small <0.001%. We all know his name, and what he did and where he works.
Have you ever worked in faang? I disagree
Any company with bigger than three people will end up with compartments that have different internal cultures.
I worked there much longer than you and 100% agree.
Most people here just confuse high output with actual high performers.
Google no longer is able to place high performers because the current elite class of execs either see them as a threat or narrative disruptors.
Likely you never climbed high enough to see this.
It can even be seen from the outside if you observe the actual output of high ranking Googlers in open source projects and compare that with their status at Google.
Some are just nasty politicians that produce neither quality nor quantity.
People lower down on the ranks never realize that this is going on. They also have no exposure to what people are like higher up, and how much of it is bullshit politics
You’ve criticized me twice (wrongly on both counts) with only speculation as your source. This typically reveals confidence issues
Huh. Worked for two decades at a very high level in the final years at Google. I’m almost entirely positive you never did either.
Sounds like a problem at google then, now that they’re on their “final years”. Why didn’t you fix it at your “high level”?
In that case, say no more.
Understand what they value as an individual: compensation, work life balance or interesting work can all be valued by top talent and it often depends where they are in life.
But first, we have to argue about our own individual interpretations of what a "high performer is", and then justify our belief that it is every single one of us, because-
The two important things a manager needs to do with high performers is simply make sure nothing stands in their way and make sure they are paid well.
My experience with high performers is they will ask for guidance when they need it. You don't need to offer it to them.