
The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent - jonbaer
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprising-problem-of-too-much-talent/
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jackgavigan
I always roll my eyes internally when I hear people talking about how they
only hire A-players.

The way I see it, you want A-players in certain positions where their
performance and influence drives the company forward - "moves the needle", to
use a clichė. You _don 't_ want A-players in mundane/support roles because
they'll end up getting frustrated and likely become disruptive (the exception
is when you put an A-player in a support role so she can learn the
ropes/basics before you move them to the role you actually want them to
fulfil).

~~~
codingdave
If someone becomes disruptive when they get frustrated, then they are not an A
player.

Part of being an "A player" is to be professional, including in their
communications and behavior. IF they are having problems with their role,
speaking to someone about it and getting the problems resolved is appropriate,
not disrupting the business.

~~~
stdbrouw
That's not the definition of an A player, that's the definition of a unicorn.
There are very few talented people who remain productive if they don't feel
they're valued / doing valuable work.

~~~
codingdave
I said nothing about remaining productive. Of course productivity suffers
along with morale. That is not the same thing as actively disrupting a
business. Quitting and/or slacking off are common reactions. But if someone
gets passive-aggressive and/or otherwise actively disrupts a team? That makes
them toxic. And no matter how talented they are, a toxic individual is not an
A player.

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draugadrotten
Most businesses that pride themselves on hiring only the "best" are of course
not doing so, but merely using such phrases to boost the morale of the
mediocre body of wage slaves they have on staff. If they truly hired the best,
their salaries would be the best. The harsh reality is that most people are
close to average. And that's OK. You don't need to be a genius to churn out
the next incremental update of a SAP IDOC.

~~~
ai2389ca
I really don't agree with this. I think a lot of people can be exceptional
alone, if they direct their efforts towards that, more so if they have
coaches, support structures, etc. But it similarly requires a kind of
intelligence and the same levels of a different kind of effort, to work
effectively with a group.

It's a kind of collective intelligence, almost like trusting your arm to
always throw the ball in the way you have practiced, you have to trust that
your team mates will be able to compute or think or calculate in ways that you
simply don't have time for, or don't know how to know how to do, because there
aren't 10 yous, and even if there were 10 yous, you'd probably be blinding
yourself half the time you try to lead yourself.

The difference between a good director / lead / manager and a bad one is
stark.

I don't think it's hard to turn a single person into a star. I think it's
really hard to keep people motivated on a unified goal, keep all those people
thinking about what needs to be built, while none of that thinking contributes
to egocentricity, passive aggressiveness, defeatist attitudes, etc. There is
so much conflict that creates tiny little cracks through an otherwise solid
foundation of skill, but all those cracks can add up. Do you spend that five
minutes solving a problem with your SAP coworker or do you spend that five
minutes grabbing coffee and grumbling to yourself about what an idiot that guy
is? For people who are aware of the cracks and go out of their way to fix
them, instead of stampeding over others with their supposed skill and
intelligence. I mean I would be an idiot if I ignored all the times my ego got
in the way of my success, and I would likewise be an idiot if I ignored the
fact that I must be aware of all of my social inadequacies, and I must be
willing to continue to learn from them, if I actually want to succeed.

Working in teams is completely different from working alone, and working in
teams is more than being able to do your part. Working in teams while
programming is being psychologically extremely close to all your teammates,
whether you realize it or not. There's some stuff that you just have to be
able to sync together with and then discard, without even really realizing
what happened. Half of the things people wind up arguing about, those things
wind up being hilarious when looked at in retrospect, if they are overcome.
It's hard to even understand how one could both simultaneously suppress and
ignore their social emotional connectivity while acting as though it does not
exist, when it clearly does. We like to think we are these efficient,
effective, calculating machines, but we aren't. This is a big reason as to why
work experience is more valuable than intellectual or educational experience.

I really think the mediocrity of development occurs with otherwise extremely
intelligent people, people capable of solving huge variation of technical and
conceptual problems, it comes from those people continuously thinking that it
is their intellectual and technical skill that needs to be constantly improved
and updated, rather than confronting how much time is literally wasted on poor
communication, difficulty resolving social conflicts, and rolling your eyes at
every motivational, team building activity. You either like the people you
work with or you don't, and some people are unfortunately very dependent on
jobs they chose out of necessity, rather than jobs they chose because those
jobs and those people make that person happy. Whether you cut people some
slack when they need it, you apologize when you make mistakes, or you ignore
those things and act like a mini tyrant, these things make big differences.
It's often not when we are at are best that determines the success of a team,
but much of the time when we are at our worst.

~~~
nikkev
This reminds me of the argument from Chasing Stars by Groysberg. It is very
difficult to separate an individual's performance from that of their
environment. A lot of factors come together, including individual skill, to
influence someone's performance. If you take that same individual and dump
them into another environment it is very difficult (or impossible) to
reproduce comparable levels of performance. Applying this to teams, there are
a lot of factors necessary for them to generate a high level of performance
that goes way beyond the individual talent/knowledge of each developer. That's
why its necessary to hiring needs to be about more than just knowledge but
personality and cultural fit as well. Then you need to look at all the support
structures that you mentioned.

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segmondy
I can see how this can be true. I've seen a team of "star" programmers fail
massively on what should be a simple project. They over designed, they used
all the new and latest, framework, language, plus spent all their time
reinventing the wheel. They forgot about time/budget constraint.

Meanwhile, a much less talented scrappy team, just figures, "Hey!, we ain't so
smart so we are going to get all the help we can" No new technology, just
small established libraries and simple design, KISS, and what do you know?
they shipped!

You can load up your sales team with talented sales agent and see massive
output, they don't need much team interaction. But a dev team? If they are
super smart, the problem better be tough or they will invent new problems to
solve.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...and Agile is mostly about restraining enthusiasm to small, testable
efforts. Which causes much moaning and misery among the most talented
developers.

What we need is, some kind of process that sorts the ambitious parts to the
talented/experienced devs, and the rote jobs to the new folks. Let the horses
run!

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summerdown2
I'm not sure how this applies to football (soccer). As far as I can see,
Barcelona have the most superstar team in world football, and are winning
everything. The next two teams with the most superstars (Madrid and Munich)
are winning everything else.

Also, isn't this impossible, too? A team that wins everything over a long
period will by default have their players considered superstars.

~~~
soneca
Barcelona has an undeniable king above all superstars, Messi. This give
perspective to all others, Neymar and Suarez just know Messi is better. And
the last batch of BCN superstars were formed by stars whose play style was
inherently teamworking: Iniesta and Xavi were midfielders whose biggest
strenght was prepare the game for others.

And Barcelona have always had its share of average, but impressively dedicated
team players, like Puyol, Piquet and others.

Real Madrid isnt the same and do not have the same performance as well.

~~~
nikkev
Puyol was by no means an average player and neither is Pique. These are
players who were/are considered to be among the top five center backs in the
world at their peak. Isn't that by definition a superstar?

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nikkev
I find the conclusions made by this paper to be dubious. Perhaps the reporting
is weak and did not properly delve into the methodology used by the authors of
the paper to draw their conclusions. But based on the article, couldn't it be
possible that teams that have the higher percentage of superstars opted to
load up on star players and therefore had less resources to flesh out the rest
of the team. What would be the point of having let's say five or six world
class players in soccer if you can only recruit below average players for the
rest of the positions.

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blackkettle
It would have been much more 'surprising' if the research had shown the
opposite to be true.

~~~
dkarapetyan
Why? Is it generally a known fact that you don't want a team of superstars?

~~~
smtddr
I thought it was.

From sports teams to software engineers, people with exceptional talent also
seem to have exceptionally large egos to match. A team of normal people can
usually tolerate & use one of them to their advantage, but a whole team of
super-egos? What would happen if __everyone__ working on the linux kernel had
the skill & personality of Linus Torvalds? There's no way that team would
function. :)

~~~
halayli
You are confusing talent and personality. You can be untalented with a
difficult personality and vice versa.

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lavya
He's not confusing talent and personality. He clearly wrote that there seems
to be a correlation between the two: "people with exceptional talent also seem
to have exceptionally large egos to match"

~~~
vkjv
Yes, but I don't agree with that hypothesis. From what I've seen, ego tends to
peak around the "above average" range where they are trying to convince
everyone (including themselves?) that they are extraordinary.

The truly amazing people demonstrate it in action not words.

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fmsf
I would argue that this is deeply correlated with the reward structure. If you
only have rockstars but they are rewarded must strongly due to individual
accomplishments they will tend to lower the team play, if instead the
rewarding is more calibrated twards team achievements, then there will be much
less worriying on who is getting credit for what. Thus increasing
collaboration. (I am assuming that the entire team is mainly A players and Bs
are filtered out, thus there isn't too much variance in individual
productivity)

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bsdpython
You want to gather the most talented and hardest working individuals with the
combined skills that you need that can also work well together as a group.
Sometimes skill trumps group dynamic and sometimes group dynamic trumps skill.
Your job when assembling a team is to make those judgement calls. It's not
difficult to understand.

~~~
vkjv
One of the interesting corollaries to this is that the right person for a role
at one point in a company / product is not necessarily the right person at a
future time.

For example, the rogue / maverick type can be very important at early stages.
They drive innovation, take risks, and get absurd amounts of things done. But,
later that same risk taking can become absolutely destructive.

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vegabook
There is a good reason why millions of years of evolution has created a
minority of "talented" people. Societies need super-talented people and
leaders (these are often not the same people, btw), but it also needs legions
of pedestrian followers. Troops. Individually, each troop is not very
impressive, but as a collective, _they_ are what makes a vision happen.

Here's a recent example of an overtalented hornet's nest:
[https://www.trumid.com/Team.aspx](https://www.trumid.com/Team.aspx)

I give them 6 months.

~~~
stdbrouw
Evolution doesn't optimize for the species, though.

~~~
vegabook
I'm not talented enough to understand what that means... please elaborate.

~~~
stdbrouw
Yeah, sorry, that was confusing. I guess I was just trying to point out that
for behavior to arise that is beneficial to a species (like the eusocial
behavior in bees), it has to increase fitness for everybody, otherwise that
kind of behavior would never evolve. If you want to draw the parallel to
creatives vs. workers in the modern workplace, I don't really see that analog
or metaphor (or literal interpretation for that matter) working very well –
one half gets all the money and recognition, the other half gets zilch.

It just seems very unlikely to me to posit that human talent is variable
because of genetic specialization within the species. It's much more likely
that talent is influenced by thousands of genes, and lots of different
combinations lead to lots of different outcomes. Not a biologist though.

~~~
vegabook
I agree with this. However if you accept that the _circumstances_ of a
society's existence are highly variable too, that each of the many different
genetic outcomes you speak of is relevant only under very specific
circumstances, then we could have a situation where a "talent" is viable at
some times, and not viable at others. In that case, we have an evolutionary
interest in maintaining many different talents, many of which will remain
latent/unused, in our multi-individual society, until circumstances wish?

Furthermore, and unrelated, it is also my personal opinion that highly
"talented" people in the definition that society places on the word, often
have deficiencies in terms of other prerequisites for success. It's a bit of a
zero-sum game in some ways. I happen to be an excellent mathematician, but I
massively envy the (far less inspired) discipline that one of my colleagues
has allowing him to be much more effective in the day to day grind of
business. Basically, I'm highly talented by most definitions, more than him
(again by the societal definition) but I'm not very effective at making money
in a world where that seems to be the scoreboard. Try as I might, I just do
not have his work ethic. I just cannot do it. So who has the talent? Him or
me?

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diego_moita
This reminds me a comment about the last World Cup: Argentina had Messi,
Portugal had Cristiano Ronaldo, Brazil had Neymar, Germany had a team.

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known
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
\--Newton

