Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

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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?

I think he's saying you cannot only rely on any particular simple metric (nor just a couple of them).

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.

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.

If anybody could do that once, they'd all have done it already, and most of them wouldn't be posting on HN anymore.

Anybody can do it once, not everybody can do it once. It's just luck of the draw, most won't be able to, but they could.

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.

Very good Albert, yet here you are posting on HN like everybody else.

Fair, but he did go on and on about all the things he's seen.

Ahh, so you consider yourself an "A" player. Ever wonder why your personal philosophy places you at the top and everyone else below?

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.

Things went downhill from there.

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.

Really? We're playing the credentials game?

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.

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.

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