Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

> To invent products like Gmail, Earth, and Translate, you need coddled geniuses free to let their minds run wild.

That statement needs to be challenged. The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great. I believe this boundary-less freedom to focus on whatever's most interesting and ignore everything else is why issues like privacy and social impact have been routinely shortchanged at companies like Google and Facebook. We've seen where that leads. (It leads to some characteristic technical problems too but that's not the topic right now.)

"Don't be evil" and similar promises don't fulfill themselves. At FAANG scale, sticking to such promises requires a certain amount of focus and discipline every working moment, not just a few people spending more time on internal groups/lists than doing technical work. I know that's going to rub most employees at those companies the wrong way, but that doesn't make it untrue.

P.S. I work at one of those companies. I do know how they work, and I'm not criticizing for criticism's sake. I'm trying to get at what I think is necessary for me and my colleagues to better ourselves and do things we can be proud of.

  That statement needs to be challenged. 
  The Montessori method might be great at small scale in an educational context, but that doesn't mean it's a great way to run a company worth most of a trillion dollars. 
  Yes, empowering employees is good. Yes, having a few "coddled geniuses" to drive basic science or radical innovation is good too. 
  OTOH, having every single engineer haring off in random directions all the time might not be so great.

Your whole post seems to be very reasonable, but there is one thing I'd like to mention, which is that you will immediately run into problems if you have rigid standards for what constitutes a "genius" and who is part of the just "the normal engineers". A "genius" can't very easily be defined. Historical examples like Mozart or Einstein make it easy to think that there are only a few geniuses whose talent is immediately entirely obvious to everyone, and the rest of society is merely average.

That is not true. To bring that kind of potential about in many people who thought they were not geniuses prior to encountering an environment where their skills are fostered is one of the greatest advantages a company could possibly have.

Some might just call this "good HR", or "caring about people". I have worked in companies where there were people who truly cared about their employees and about their strengths (and who could not afford the obvious "geniuses") and who thus almost "created" these geniuses. I know there are many ways in which I am simplifying this and I know that no company should try to employ purely geniuses. I have worked in a small team of six "very, very advanced" people in their respective fields. It was basically impossible to create any kind of cohesion. I would suspect it would be similar with other teams of "geniuses". Maybe not, but I think you are overall right in what you say, but it is so incredibly important to understand that the lines between a "genius" and a "run of the mill" developer may be more blurred than most people expect.

Fair point. To clarify, I think of "coddled genius" as a good-to-have role, not a descriptor of a person. In fact, I think it's even better if multiple people rotate through that role. A permanent division between "people who play" and "people who work" (as I put it at one job) is bad for both groups, and for the product/company. The point I was making was that not everybody should be in that role, but I neglected to point out that it shouldn't be too limited either. Both the percentage of people in that role and the standards to which they are held (different than those in more traditional product-oriented roles) should be intentional, not the result of applying a universal culture or management style more appropriate to an elementary school than to a place of business.

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