
Measure results, not hours - nerfhammer
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/measure-results-not-hours-to-improve-work-efficiency.xml
======
shadowmint
Mm... great article, but I can't help feeling it skips over the important
bits.

"But your boss is likely to be receptive if you politely raise the question of
productivity and show you’re willing to be held accountable for results,
rather than hours worked."

Yeah right.

The problem is that it's extremely _non trivial_ to deconstruct your
assumptions and social behaviour.

Even if your boss/manager/whatever is clued up and knows his/her stuff,
workplaces are a social gathering, and quiet introverted non-socialising
members of the team will never get rewarded for their hard work. _Especially_
if they're seen leaving early every day.

Where I work, we have a guy who leaves at 3pm every day; he gets in between
5-6am.

His own team gives him the 'ironic' farewell round of applause when he walks
out everyday.

Why? Because he's leaving early.

He's a hard working dedicated worker, but _appearances are important_ , and
leaving early makes it appear that you're slacking off, that you're not there
when you're needed for that last minute 5pm meeting.

The few people who actually know what he does completely respect him; but no
one else gets it.

That's the problem: unless you publize not only to your immediate work peers,
but the entire local work area, what you're doing and why, no one gets it, and
they make assumptions.

This article would be more useful if it addressed that issue.

Simply saying: Work hard, leave early and get your boss to accept you for who
you are... agh. Don't. It wont work.

~~~
5teev
At least you get a few quiet hours between 6 and 9 to actually get things
done. I've noticed much less resentment of people who come in after 10 and
leave after 6. Same hours, different perception.

Because somehow, no one sees you come in, but everyone sees you go home.

~~~
keithpeter
How would the hours I spend on a remote desktop session count in your office?

I'm a teacher, its outcomes all the way for us, and being there when the class
meets.

------
Apreche
This seems to be common sense to everyone who is not a "boss" and unheard of
to anyone who is. Find me a company that actually follows this philosophy, and
sign me up. I have yet to find one real example.

Here's the real problem companies face with people like me. If I only had to
get the work done, I could be in the office for maybe one day a week. With all
that free time, I would be able to do something on my own so that I wouldn't
even need to work for them at all anymore. Then what do they do? By trapping
me there for 40 hours a week and limited vacation time, it's very difficult
for me to comfortably escape.

~~~
laaph
I worked in an office where we got the work done... and we did.

And then we were given more tasks. And more tasks. To the point that there was
no way to get everything done on a deadline.

At some point I said to myself, I could pull an all-nighter, still have missed
deadlines, or I could go home at 5, and have maybe one less missed deadline.
It was an easy choice.

Unless you work in a place that only has need for a finite amount of work, no
matter how effective you are getting things done, there will always be more
things to do. If there is only a finite amount of work to be done, then an
employee is not what you need - a contractor is.

(Of course a good manager will balance the number of engineers to the work
load. Ours did say that he had enough to hire two more engineers -- but didn't
know if he would have this much work for them next quarter.)

~~~
lsc
how much you work at a salary job is a constant negotiation between the worker
and the boss.

It sounds like your boss screwed the pooch on that one, though. Killed the
goose that laid the golden eggs.

It's a hard negotiation, really, for both parties, as different people
function differently at different stress levels. But yeah; most bosses
optimize for but-in-seat time rather than for actual productivity, which, of
course, does not increase shareholder value or employee happiness; It's bad
for everyone.

Personally, I think it's a symptom of 'optimizing for appearances' - the
managers run the companies, sure, but they don't own them, so they don't care
about real productivity, only about the perception of productivity.

------
sriramk
Interesting timing. The NYTimes has a piece today on Dick Costolo[1] which
mentions Peter Thiel talking about Twitter employees heading home early and
how Costolo is staying at work late to get employees to do the same thing.

Even the leading companies/leading people in our industry seem to look at
'hours spent at work' as a signal of overall productivity.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/technology/dick-costolo-
of...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/technology/dick-costolo-of-twitter-
an-improv-master-writing-its-script.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
flyinglizard
It's broader than productivity alone. A team that's working long hours can be
perceived as more committed, dedicated and in a fighting mood.

It's really all about team dynamics and corporate culture.

See, successful entrepreneurs are, more often than not, binary beings that
totally devote themselves to their company and expect other the other people
in the team to do so as well. Someone can come and work for 5 hours and
accomplish just the same as he would over 11 hours but it may send the wrong
message to the group - that the company is secondary to personal life and that
just meeting your obligations is really enough, no need to do beyond that.

Furthermore, some people wouldn't be able to accomplish the same over a short
working day; how would that make them feel spending 11 hour days in the
office, while their colleague leaves after 6 hours and still gets appreciated?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
> how would that make them feel spending 11 hour days in the office, while
> their colleague leaves after 6 hours and still gets appreciated?

Hopefully like an unproductive lump who needs to learn how to turn off Hacker
News and Facebook during the day so they can also get some work done.

------
oconnor0
"By emphasizing results rather than hours, I'm able to get home at 7 p.m. for
dinner with my family nearly every night"

And, here, I assumed that by emphasizing results he meant getting home around
5...

~~~
saraid216
I suspect he meant "be home at", rather than "get home at".

~~~
Evbn
That was not the source of confusion.

------
hristov
This is something that the large clients for legal services have been
advocating for a while. It is generally called project based billing. Many
legal fields operate more or less on project based billing nowadays, even if
they technically operate on hourly billing. (Usually the billing is hourly but
there is understanding about how long each project should take).

I think this is very dangerous and tends to reward mediocre work. But it is
probably inevitable too, because in the legal field a large client will
usually eventually get what he/she wants.

This article actually shows a big danger about project based billing. Notice
his second piece of advice (Reduce Reading). Can you imagine having a lawyer
who thinks he does not have to read everything to the end? This will end badly
for some poor client.

------
kristofferR
I completely agree with this. Measuring productivity solely by hours in front
of a screen is completely useless.

On the other hand, tracking hours can be really benificial too, if done
correctly. I love using DeskTime.com for personal use (for company use it
seems counterproductive) since it lets me easily track how much time I've
spent on productive apps/web sites compared to unproductive apps/web sites.

Yesterday I had a great work day for example, I spent 14 hours in front of the
computer screen. 11 hours of those were spent in productive apps/websites,
like my text editor, FTP, terminal, API-documentation sites, CRM, admin
backend etc and 1h 30m in unproductive apps/websites like Hacker News and
Reddit.com.

I got quite a lot done, so I was really satisfied with my day. On the other
hand I spent over 3 hours trying to fix what turned out to be a missing comma
in a configuration file. If I had spotted the error faster I could have spent
more than 3 hours less time working, while still being just as productive. If
I had more experience with the things I did yesterday I could probably have
done as much in half the time.

Just goes to show that even "productive hours" isn't the most important thing,
the only thing that matters in the end is the results.

~~~
scotty79
Productive hours are the right thing to measure. Some task can take few hours
or minutes depending on luck. Also expeirience but that's already factored
into your hourly rate. If you had fixed (low) pay for adding missing coma
you'd have to swollow the risk that it might take you hours and pay a little.
That's what most programmers and lawers try to avoid by charging hourly rates.

------
griffindy
non mobile version: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/measure-
results-n...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/business/measure-results-not-
hours-to-improve-work-efficiency.html?pagewanted=all)

~~~
bnegreve
Interestingly, I find the mobile version much more readable on my laptop.

------
will_work4tears
How does a manager measure results between two guys, one that has 18 very easy
todos done, vs a guy with 3 very difficult todos done when the manager can't
even comprehend the difference between the difficultly level of the tasks.
Then the easy task guy looks like a rockstar, and the rockstar problem solver
looks like a lazy douche.

~~~
dsr_
A manager who can't figure out the difference between 18 easy items and 3
difficult items is already incompetent to manage those projects.

~~~
michaelt
Perhaps you've seen the article on the front page about effort estimation for
programmers [1]. I know when I'm handed a bug to fix, until I find the cause I
have no idea if it'll be a three hour task or a three day task.

If programmers don't know up front how much effort a task will take, how
should managers?

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4621268>

------
troels
That's very sweet, but the problem with this idea is that hours worked is very
easy to measure - But value created is much harder. Even if you could measure
that relatively precise, what happens if an employee spends a lot of time on a
task that later turns out to be worthless. Are you going to punish him for
that? That hardly seems fair.

Basically, we measure time worked because it correlates pretty good with
effort made and that in turn tends to correlate with value produced. Unless
you work in a field where the value is easily measured (Like sales), there
really is no alternative.

------
enraged_camel
If I got the projects assigned to me done in 10 hours, I would just be
assigned more projects instead of being allowed to take the rest of the week
off. That seems to be the culture of my company: productivity is punished with
more work, rather than rewarded with extra time off. My boss jokes about it
all the time by saying "no good deed goes unpunished around here" but he
doesn't realize that it's not a joke. It's reality. :(

------
scotty79
There are places where you are paid for the fact that you come into the office
and that people who see you are content with you. This creates culture of
staying late.

There are places where you bill by the hour. This causes slacking off because
you have financial incentives to work longer.

There are almost no places where knowledge workers are paid for results
because you can't objectivly asses results. They must be assesed by a human.
Manager most likely is too clueless to asses them. He also might be evil and
just reward loyalty to him instead of the value of the work done.

I think that the most efficient environment is to pay for each hour but
closely monitor what the people are doing and communication between them.
You'll have to pay much more then the competition though because people factor
in slacking off into their expected pay. So not many companies bother. They
prefer to accept some degrees of slacking off especially because that enforces
the illusion of company as one happy family.

------
jonathanwallace
Wow, this sounds like it came directly out of the ROWE playbook,
<http://www.gorowe.com/>, something we practice at my job to much success.

~~~
rpwilcox
I also would be interested in a blog post about this. Seems to me (and some
other commentators) on this thread, that very often there's an "infinite"
amount of work to do, and I don't see how that squares with "we pay you for
results".

A team I was on a few years ago did scrum (poorly). We had a list of tickets
the product owner wanted done for the sprint. Except, more often than not,
additional tickets would be added into the sprint (Either because us engineers
found dependencies or because of additional bug requests).

Scrum doctrine says that you now have a broken sprint, and all bets are off.
Did it matter to management? Nope.

This was a large Rails project (about 7 full time developers for a year+).
It's possible it's different when you're working on many small projects.

I guess my worry about ROWE is situations where the result is, "Implementing
all your tickets on your plate" and worries about what happens in environments
where tickets get added to your plate such that the number of your tickets on
Thursday == the number of your tickets on Tuesday. (Even though you
implemented 6 tickets between now and then). I would certainly be interested
in any comments/information/thought you have on a situation like that.

~~~
MattRogish
I work with Jonathan as a client - and my organization also does ROWE. I can
say for a certainty that it works great for Rails projects. It comes down to
intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation.

Hours, made-up deadlines, etc. are all forms of extrinsic motivation which
have been _proven_ to destroy creativity, problem solving, and productivity.

ROWE needs to be a part of a bigger whole at how we look at and motivate
employees. If you just drop ROWE into your current organization without taking
a systems-level view, you're likely to fail. ROWE is like Agile - it's not a
panacea - but if you zoom out and incorporate the philosophy at a systems
level, I think you'll get great results.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mG-hhWL_ug>

~~~
rpwilcox
Yes, Agile in not a panacea: you can't just drop it into an existing org and
expect things to be rainbows and kittens. It needs to be accepted both at the
grass-roots level AND management level.

Then when Agile fails a person or an organization it's Agile's (or Scrum's)
fault... when it's really a people problem.

I guess I'm just waiting for the blog articles, 10 years from now, bemoaning
ROWE because it didn't save an organization with a toxic environment. :-) (And
feeling sorry for the poor developers involved).

~~~
jonathanwallace
As an addendum to what Matt said, like any substantial initiative, ROWE needs
support from the whole organization to succeed.

But as you mention Ryan, it is super easy for those being measured to game
metrics and optimize so that they look good. Mitigating this effect is very
challenging and one that we continually face but our approach, and it has held
up well so far, is to focus on people over process. I.e., our results include
questions like "Are developers happy?" and "Are clients happy?"

Nebulous questions with unquantifiable metrics like these keep us honest and
communicative with our clients and focused on the process of setting
reasonable expectations that satisfy all. We stay focused on the people and
change the process to ensure results, and expectations, are met.

Results may change from developer to developer, client to client, and week to
week! We expect them to change as we make progress on the project.

------
stretchwithme
Carol Dweck says we should praise effort, not success, if we want people to
love challenges and practice persistence.

So, praise effort, measure results, but don't worry about time spent at a
desk.

~~~
jacques_chester
This is true for teaching children the value of persistence and effort.

In a work environment, however, it teaches everyone that all that is valued is
wasteful heroics.

~~~
stretchwithme
Heroics? How is carrying through on things that take long term effort anything
like wasteful heroics?

~~~
jacques_chester
It's not. I think we're talking about different things.

Heroics are unavoidable -- sometimes there's no alternative. But it can slip
into a pathological state where only heroic effort is recognised and rewarded;
and so becomes the norm.

When you say "praising for effort", I thought you were making the same class
of error.

------
mayukh
"In general, don't waste your time creating A-plus work when B-plus is good
enough. Use the extra time to create A-plus work where it matters most." I
wish I did more of this ...

------
tehwalrus
My old company had this down to a T.

First, you only had to complete your EU mandated 37.5 hours per week. If you
went over (without a good reason like an urgent project deliverable,) they
would ask why you were being inefficient, and if you needed more managerial
support or more resource on your team.

Second, you had to account for every one of those 37.5 hours against tasks and
their estimates - and you often didn't write your own estimates (and when you
did, it was with manager review.)

Your results, therefore, were based on slip and gain against quite realistic
estimates, and if there was serious slip on an estimate (e.g. 2 hours work
took you a day) there would inevitably be a review (although, generally, one
focussing on how you could improve next time.) Hours worked were measured too,
though, and if there was a lot of work and not enough resource and you stayed
late to fill the gap, you were rewarded (especially if this was sustained over
a long period of time.)

If I procrastinated some of my time away at this place, I had to catch up the
time later in order to make my weekly status look acceptable. As I worked
there, I got better at getting my assigned stuff done during standard office
hours, and avoiding working late evenings and Saturdays (which I hated more
than resisting procrastination, it turned out!)

Oh, a final point - they also had flexible working hours (one guy would start
at about 3pm and work until midnight! I tended to fall into a 10-6 or 11-7
pattern..) so if people weren't in at 9am, noone raised an eyebrow. Indeed, I
was told not to arrive before 10am on my first day, as there would likely be
noone to let me in.

I think ultimately this is about organisational culture - something you have
to concentrate on defining early on in a new company, and which is almost
impossible to change. This is one reason I want to start my own company when I
finish my PhD, rather than working for someone else's which doesn't get my
work style and punishes me for not fitting in. This is partly why I left that
old employer, although it wasn't to do with their perception of how hard I
worked, it was a different aspect of their culture.

~~~
rpwilcox
It's great that your organization is responsible about it. Sounds like there's
a great deal of trust in your organization.

It sounds like there are numerous ways for this to go badly - ie: when it gets
noticed that you went over 37.5 hours in some organizations that might start
to be a blame game, or you'd start getting requests to "we need it done, but
we also need you to do it off the clock so we don't get into trouble for
breaking EU regs".

It's great that your organization sees that people might be in trouble and has
a mature (aka: not blaming) attitude. I guess I always assume organizations
will adopt ROWE without making the appropriate cultural changes.

~~~
tehwalrus
just to briefly defend the EU - the 37.5 hour mandate is how much a contract
can oblige you to work, not how much work you can actually do. That was, more
controversially, recently capped at 60 hours per week or something, which was
a massive problem for medical students/interns who wanted to qualify in less
than 10 years.

Back to the company, by the time I left the culture had morphed a bit, and
people were encouraged to work extra hours _to compensate for their slip_ ,
where necessary. Still much better than (what I hear of) the US, where
stupidly long hours are expected (apparently).

------
snowwrestler
How do you square this sort of mindset with the well-known demands of
entrepreneurship? In other words, if it's possible to do great work in short
amounts of time, why do most successful entrepreneurs end up working very long
hours to make their companies succeed? If it's possible to check out at 5pm
M-F and still excel, why do investors look for the highest possible levels of
commitment from the founders in whom they invest?

Personally I think stories like this arise from the fallacy that jobs have a
set amount of work. Entrepreneurs know that is not true--there is not some
predetermined, set amount that an Apple laptop needs to better than an HP
laptop. The truth is that any and _all_ competitive advantage should be seized
--it might be needed to survive.

Of course not everyone is a founder; most people are employees. But employees
have an interest in their company's success too--it keeps them employed. In
addition, high performance offers them opportunity for promotions, raises,
advancement, publicity, etc.

I think that if you are a talented enough employee to get the "expected" work
done in less than the expected time, the thing to do is to fill the remaining
hours by doing work that beats expectations. Increase quality even more; put
that gold leaf on since you have time. Or, spend that time thinking and
inventing an unexpected addition or improvement--or even a new product.

~~~
adrianhoward
_How do you square this sort of mindset with the well-known demands of
entrepreneurship?_

Because the 'well-known demands' are mostly socially constructed myths rather
than reality. Because people are really bad at tracking stuff-done and find
tracking hours-worked and looking at stuff-to-do much easier to think about.
Because people a _really fucking awful_ at figuring out how productive they
are.

I have been a team coach _multiple_ times where I have demonstrated by,
weirdly, actually tracking the amount of work done that teams working fewer
hours were producing more work. The amount of push back from these sorts of
results from management _and_ the team is incredible.

People _know_ that if they only stayed a bit later they would get more done
despite lots of evidence, by our tracking stories completed, bug reports, user
satisfaction, etc. all went down the more hours people worked.

Tired people make mistakes. Tired people work slowly. You can be tired without
'feeling' tired. In anything but the very short term (and I'm talking days,
maybe a week or two tops) trying to do hard intellectual, creative work for
more than 30-40 hours a week will make you slower overall - not faster.

Hell - Ford promoted the 40 hour week as the maximum productivity point for
physical labour on a production line... and we somehow imagine that working 60
hour weeks is going to make us do more.

People still seem to conceptualise 60 hour weeks as 40 normal hours + 20
extra. In fact it's 60 hours of being knackered where you're probably being
half as productive as you would be if you were fully rested - but you're too
damn tired to realise it.

------
jchrisa
Speaking for myself, I'm most productive when I work roughly a 3 day week,
with 4 days to chill and goof off. So I do that (when customer stuff and my
travel schedule allows), and I hope that my employees who feel similarly would
do the same. Sort of the opposite of staying late to set an example.

------
nevster
"Doing a half-day?" is the remark I hate hearing the most when leaving at 5.
It's said as a joke and yet it's not.

Upvotes for the person who can come up with a good come-back!

(Note, this is not a problem where I work at the moment. And even at places
where it's been said, I just ignore it. Just leave at 5 people!)

~~~
jimfl
Good kids don't get detention.

------
avb
The author is absolutely correct.

I can't begin to tell you how much this bugs me. It's not about how many hours
it takes to do something, it's about the value created from the service or
product. Is the answer the author has given worth more or less because his
knoweldge and expertise allow him to provide an answer quickly? With hourly
billing, it's always less. The client sees it as trivial and the employer sees
little or no value.

I see it the other way. Being able to provide an answer or solution quickly
shouild be rewarded. Being held accountable for correct and timely results are
much more important than simply clocking hours.

Billing hourly, paying employees hourly, etc. are all counter-productive to
incentivising knowledge workers to excel. Even the honest ones.

------
hayksaakian
>By applying an industrial-age mind-set to 21st-century professionals, many
organizations are undermining incentives for workers to be efficient. Every
step of the American education system felt like this.

~~~
jaggederest
That's because the American educational system was set up by industrialists to
produce a trained workforce, not for some sort of noble philosophical ideal of
enlightenment. You'll note that none of the scions of industry attend public
school.

~~~
Evbn
Private schools are mostly the same structurally, they just have better
tracking/pace since class sizes are smaller, and they can exclude disruptive
students.

~~~
forensic
!!!

Tracking, pace, small class sizes, and excluding disruptive students makes ALL
the difference.

It's the difference between a bespoke education delivered by an excellent
teacher, and a shit cookie cutter education delivered by a scantron machine.

~~~
Evbn
I don't disagree with you. Buy private shools aren't bespoke tutoring in the
tradition of the European aristocracy or student-driven explorations of the
world, they are the same lecture/ work/ small project/ test structure of
public schools.

~~~
forensic
The extra teaching resources are there and available for students that want or
need them. Most students just care not to.

------
OldSchool
Somewhere interruptions tie into productivity in a big way yet are rarely
addressed. A one-minute interruption doesn't only delay you by a minute, it
takes you some time to collect yourself and continue where you left off. Work
in an office, away but tethered by phone or even only by IM/text it's all the
same to varying degrees. A typical office gets you all these at the same time
so the standard work environment is the worst in this sense. Offsite with
limited, guaranteed only pre-scheduled contact is the ideal, at least for me.

------
jimfl
Give up trying to measure people against some standard yardstick. It doesn't
work in school, it doesn't work at work. People have a complex set of inter-
relating competencies, and managing them is challenging work, not an exercise
in stack ranking them by some index. Don't be lazy.

------
tete
On the other hand you can also measure things like whether the written code is
maintainable, well documented, portable, ...

It's a bit like measuring lines of code or similar things. I kinda wished
everybody could be his own boss and be actually be responsible.

------
khet
If I get my work done in 2 hours, do I have to work an extra 6 hours as
punishment for being super competent?

What constitutes as enough work/value for a day?

------
tkahn6
The hourly rate thing has always bothered me. At my internship at Bloomberg
the maximum amount of billable hours per week was 40 and usually they'd expect
you to put in 8 hours a day. More often than not, I'd finish an assigned task
before the day or week was through or I'd be 'direction blocked' where I would
be waiting for approval in a design/architecture decision from my mentor or
manager while they were busy with something else.

I would find side projects to work on, a form of '20% time', but I always felt
really uncomfortable with the whole situation. Was I expected to forgo pay
when there wasn't enough work for me? It was a really weird experience. It
wasn't like I was a student working part time, I was living alone in NYC over
the summer and had rent and food to pay for.

~~~
wilfra
Was it like that for people who had been on the job for years, or just
interns? If just interns, they probably had issues in the past with not doing
it this way. You've got to earn trust etc.

~~~
vonmoltke
Can't speak for Bloomberg, but its like that at any company that words on US
Government contracts. USG accounting always requires time and materials
records for every contract, even fixed price ones. That means everyone who
works on USG contracts must keep a time card showing what contracts they
worked on and how may hours they worked, completed daily. Every company
expects their employees to bill an average of 8 hours per day for some period;
at my former employer that meant 40 hours per week, while at my current
employer it means X hours per calendar month (where X = 8 * workdays).
Underbilling for salaried employees is covered out of company overhead.

Billing additional hours is a little complicated and varies based on the
specific projects and company accounting practices. My current employer pays
hour-for-hour for extra time billed, and we record all time worked. My
previous employer had a hard cutoff at 40 hours (unless overtime was
authorized), with the first 40 billable hours worked being what got recorded.
If overtime was authorized for a given contract, one needed to work at least
48 hours per week on it to get paid extra, at which point you got paid hour-
for-hour. I don't know why they did this, because the USG's preferred method
for recording work hours by salaried employees who are not being paid extra is
to record all hours worked but reduce the hourly rate accordingly.

------
wilfra
"committed" "dedicated" "hard worker"

None of these address intelligence nor even competence - and I think it is a
mistake to assume a good manager wouldn't realize that. If a star performer
showed up late, left early and never arrived to a meeting on time but they
were doing amazing work, they'd be given a lot of leeway to do that - again,
by a good manager.

That is how sales works. Top salesmen do whatever they want, nobody questions
their methods nor cares about how 'committed' they seem - the only thing that
matters is how much more money they are bringing the company than everybody
else.

I've never worked at a Google/Facebook/Amazon class tech company but I would
imagine it is similar with 10x engineers and designers there.

~~~
Evbn
Being late for meetings is incompatible with doing good work. Either you are
interfering with other people's work by stiffing them when they need to talk
to you, or you are interrupting your productivity by showing up at all.

10x engineers don't do it on short hours. They do it by working harder in an
environment where everyone is smart. Cf Claude Shannon ("achievement is
exponential, working 10% longer has a compounding effect, like interest in a
bank account") or Randy Pausch ("if you want me to tell you the secret of my
success, call me any Friday night at my office")

~~~
wilfra
"10x engineers don't do it on short hours. They do it by working harder in an
environment where everyone is smart. Cf Claude Shannon ("achievement is
exponential, working 10% longer has a compounding effect, like interest in a
bank account") or Randy Pausch ("if you want me to tell you the secret of my
success, call me any Friday night at my office")"

That is some Gold. Thanks!

