Comment by rndmize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rndmize | Hacker News Reader

This feels like a rehash of older ideas I don't particularly like, eg. "A players hire A players, B players hire C players", etc.

For a long time I couldn't pin down why this stuff bugged me, but I think I finally have it: it considers people to be static and one-dimensional. Because hey, there's no way the people who are expert/genius/10x could fall off the wagon, or stop keeping up with the field, or have kids, or burn out, right?

And similarly, the reverse is also true - is it impossible to train people to be better at their jobs? Are successful startups a magical place where a couple brilliant people come together and after that, a company can never hire that level of brilliance again?

There was another article a week or two ago that spent some time discussing how software tends to be 80% reading/maintenance work and 20% (maybe) greenfield work, and how optimizing for readability, durability, easily understood code and the like is better for the long-term health of a project/company than flashes of brilliance. And I'd guess that as your product scales and matures, shipping quickly becomes more difficult because more work has to be done to prepare things; quality expectations have changed; interfacing with and matching existing components functionality becomes a bigger part of the process. Saying stuff like "we lost our most brilliant people and now things are falling apart" feels like an excuse and an organizational failure to me, rather than a talent problem.

> For a long time I couldn't pin down why this stuff bugged me, but I think I finally have it: it considers people to be static and one-dimensional.

Great point.

These articles also assume that companies are static, one-dimensional, and only get worse over time. These articles are designed to resonate with people who left some previous job in the past that didn’t go well, which is a common enough experience that most engineers will experience it at least once over a career.

The problem is that they take this generic experience (which the reader likely recognizes as valid because they’ve seen it before) and try to present it as if it’s a law that all companies are doomed to follow. In reality, companies ebb and flow over time as management changes over and many good companies get better, not worse. Unfortunately articles like this create a fatalism or doomerism that creates some very cynical engineers. Ironically, those cynical engineers often become the “B players” that lead to a decline of a company, all while they imagine themselves as the “A players” because they think they’re the only ones who see it like it is.

In my experience ‘A’ players don’t just ‘work’. They have a passion about what they do and just fulfill their passion with work that happens to be useful to others.

‘B’ players, though… they indeed just do a job through the day. No passion, just a job well done. They like to think that they have other things to do with their life, and they do exactly that.

The simple word is elitism: We'd all like to be part of some in-group that is automatically entitled to success with minimal effort. Broadly speaking, it's really just plain old immaturity that most programmers will outgrow if they aren't coddled.

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