
The problem with being a top performer (2017) - derekp7
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-being-a-top-performer/
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gentleman11
> The results showed that star performers triggered different reactions from
> their peers depending on the resources available to the team. If resources
> were limited, peers felt threatened by and competitive toward high
> performers and thus undermined them. If resources were shared, peers
> benefitted from working with a star and thus socially supported the high
> performer.

Germany is known for being a nation of high performers, and also for being a
country known for collective reward/punishment. Could that be related?

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jgwil2
I am intrigued by the seemingly counterintuitive notion that organizations
could best encourage effective individual performance by rewarding team
performance.

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gopalv
> seemingly counterintuitive notion that organizations could best encourage
> effective individual performance by rewarding team performance

This works in both directions, unfortunately & almost always accelerates your
current direction.

If the team is starting to fall behind, the employees who are the high end of
the scale start to lose motivation or develop resentment towards those who are
not pulling their weight.

Rational decisions can sometimes be the wrong one in a prisoner's dilemma.

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supernova87a
I don't know how this other point should factor in, but in software
especially:

Unlike in other types of say, physical labor where a top performer is just a
few (X) more productive than the average performer -- in software, a top
performer can be orders of magnitude (10-100X) more productive / more creative
than the average worker.

I don't know what exactly contributes to this (intangible knowledge turning
into action much more concretely, ability to avoid important pitfalls much
more capably, ability to demonstrate correctly much quicker, no dependency on
physical action, etc), but I have observed this to be a phenomenon.

~~~
nikofeyn
> Unlike in other types of say, physical labor where a top performer is just a
> few (X) more productive than the average performer -- in software, a top
> performer can be orders of magnitude (10-100X) more productive / more
> creative than the average worker.

i don't buy that at all. 100x means that the person could do one day's worth
of work that would then take five months for a "normal" engineer to accomplish
the same work. that simply isn't realistic. there may be one off cases, but
that's a possibility in any field, although you seem to claim otherwise.

and "orders of magnitude" implies a lot. 10x is one order of magnitude, and
100x (highly doubtful anyway) is just two orders of magnitude.

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Jack000
I don't believe in 100x engineers, but I've seen 0.1x engineers and some who
probably go negative. There's a limit to how badly you can stock shelves, but
a bad line of code can (and has) destroyed companies.

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option_greek
One has to wonder how many of the 'high' performers (especially in software
industry) are just people extremely good at drawing visibility to their work
vs their peers who might not be having such 'skills'.

~~~
looping__lui
The highest performing and most effective individuals on my teams (5x-10x) are
constantly hiding and downplaying their achievements.

A sign for a 5x-10xEr is “yeah, that was easy, I just used some OpenSource,
wrote a some scripts and integrated it; not worth to mention” vs the “I build
everything from scratch because I believe we have a very unique need and I can
do better than everybody else”

People I consider 5x-10xer find very elegant solutions to very hard problems
and are more often than not embarrassed about how little effort was required
and constantly downplay it.

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l33tbro
It's one of the inherent challenges of a democracy. When everybody has a
chance at participating and making riches through hard work, people hyper-
value achievenent and wealth. Contrast this with a feudal society, where the
landed gentry and the serfs are less focused on wealth - because things are
settled and people are more or less content.

Top performers in democracies can be resented because their achievement
creates envy and shame within those that had that same opportunity, but have
either squandered it through laziness or have been unlucky. Also, because
members of a democracy share a common value of equality, signs of
exceptionalism can often be perceived by the majority as discordant -
especially if the individual shows no humility and deferrence to the majority.

These are not my ideas - but what the French philosopher de Tocqueville found
when he travelled to the US in the early 1830's to study democracy - which he
wrote about in 'Democracy in America'

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purplezooey
The article does not address the crude ways we usually have of measuring what
a top performer _is_. I believe our age will be remembered as the one where we
said "everything measured gets improved" and proceeded to put in place shitty,
half baked metrics on everything.

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xiphias2
The problems at work often comes down to moral: when a low performer is honest
about his performance, he's happy to follow the lead of a higher performer
person. Whenever I see a moral issue with a person in any part of my life, I
run away as fast as I can.

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jhayward
Do you mean 'morale', or 'moral'?

I'm not sure why you would run away from someone who's going through a low
morale patch, we all get them. Seems like it would be the mark of a shallow
individual to just abandon people.

~~~
xiphias2
I meant moral/ethical values. I abadon people who lie to me or to other
people. I'm sorry if I didn't express myself correctly, I'm not a native
English speaker.

~~~
LeoTinnitus
In my experience, sometimes you have to lie because being sometimes situations
arise where being honest hurts my immediate credibility which ultimately can
hurt our relationship.

Lying to me is a tool that has to be used effectively. It's a fine line where
if you do it too little, people think of you as a tool or you hurt yourself.
If you do it a lot, nobody trusts you. It's a socially something that should
be expected, but something for you to consider to yourself.

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fogleman
The emissions test study is interesting to me because in college I had a
shitty car that overheated during inspection. The inspector seemed to go out
of his way to help (fiddling with the radiator) and the inspection passed.

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sys_64738
Are top performers team players? If you are a top performer who always gets
the juicy assignments then that's to the detriment to the growth of other
people. But there are only so many top performers in many organizations. Just
like when the top performer at high school goes to college and finds they're
no better than average there, top performers are some mediocre companies will
be put on performance plans at Google.

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troughway
Software development wise, how this whole thing tie into Brooks' Mythical Man-
Month "Surgery" approach?

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p_l
There's related study work mentioned in Peopleware when they were testing for
signs of low and high performing _organizations_ , including a lot on "10x
developer" and how the team is more important (because it's also the team that
helps high-performers reach the high performance).

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LeoTinnitus
I've experienced this first hand when I was a know nothing try hard at a
office job that didn't matter.

I learned fast to document.EVERYTHING!

Not that management can always have your back, but they most certainly will
turn a blind eye when someone bitches or complains.

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brunoTbear
Sometimes HN is the mirror that we hold up to our own faces.

