It's hard to trust that this is from a real "A-player" when it throws so many of my "not an A-Player but a genial bullshitter" flags.
- Poorly written and communicated, with faux-profound single word paragraphs
- 'Insights' that would look more at home on a wall decal ("It’s true that I resisted the negativity, escaped, and embraced the positivity and rode it to its potential.")
- "I used to think this way, before I became enlightened" style statements showing complete lack of self-awareness
- Article about a vague concept without defining any of the behaviours that go along with that concept
- Reference to 2x2 matrices (iron law of management theory: all of human behaviour can be collapsed into four quadrants)
- Sign up for my newsletter modal
- His own signature at the end of the post
Is there anything in his background that separates this from the low-grade shlock that pollutes my Medium feed on a daily basis?
You've listed things that make him not an A player in your mind, can you list the things that would indicate he is one? Can you objectively compare that list to some A players and back test your assumptions?
My biggest problem with the "A" player mythology is that I don't think anyone has any real way to judge it, so "A" player becomes "looks like me". Which I think is the heart of our industry's myriad issues.
For me, when I think of an A Player, I think of people like Martin Fowler, Patrick McKenzie, Jess Frazelle. All have demonstrable track records, and share hugely detailed posts which are backed up with real experience and not vague insights.
They are sharing material that generates large amounts of value and helps define and shape their respective areas (such as Martin's piece on Serverless, Patrick's work helping support small vendors, Jess's "Containerize everything" post), and what they do share is clearly and cogently written without bullshit or hyperbole.
They are names that immediately come to mind when someone asks me "Do you know someone who is good on... ?"
Can I pick on myself in the course of larger picking on the cult of "A players"?
I'd rate myself as C- at my first job, local-A-but-global-C at the salaryman gig, A at Bingo Card Creator, C- at Appointment Reminder, A+ to B- depending on engagement during my consulting career. (I'll take the liberty of excluding my last two gigs out of social concern.)
I am something of an expert on my own work history and can pull any amount of evidence required to substantiate these lower grades. I literally slept on the job as a translator, out of boredom and underengagement. That should be classic C behavior, right? I think I missed growth goals (that I set and owned!) for ~20 consecutive quarters at Appointment Reminder.
And yeah, I also have done some pretty good work over the last 15 years, too.
So what happened? Some of it was straight-up skills growth; I'd paste 25 year old me along almost any axis (10 years later). But 25 year old me had approximately the same health, approximately the same intelligence, and approximately the same diligence... how come he couldn't figure out what time to leave the house to reliably arrive at 9 AM, even though he knew his colleagues were exasperated by that?
Part of it is the nature of the organization. If you're a 26 year old at a Japanese megacorp if you give what is, to the global standard, excellent work, the company's immune system will reject you. I was a good soldier, and gave the organization what it wanted, which is (by the standards of almost any HNer) shockingly low measurable productivity, delivered in a fashion which suggested that I was going to upset no apple carts. I don't know if there is any company routinely present on HN which is not a Japanese megacorp that would be even borderline happy with me reprising that performance.
I strongly believe that there are ways to be an excellent A+++ Googler and replicate the same performance at a startup while flying it into the side of a mountain, at an angle and speed which non-Googlers would be envious of but for the whole flaming death thing. This goes for many tuples which are not (Google, archetypical startup), too.
There are a number of factors other that identity-of-organization that are also confounders. I think I have highly variable productivity (even if you drop periods of poor health as outliers), and if consistency matters to you more than absolute results, I would be a poor candidate for most jobs. I have had team dynamics which acted as force-multipliers for me (and vice versa); I have had teams which had dynamics where adding me added much less than a simple "sum the productivity of these two units" model would suggest.
I think that I'm much, much better at some roles than I am at others. I'm a passable interpreter on my best day and have had serious breaches of the canon of professional ethics twice. (The canon is wrong on the issue [+], but it isn't ambiguous.) I'm a much better writer... in English, on a restricted subset of topics, to a particular audience/cluster of audiences.
I do not think that my written work is a complete accounting of what I'm good at; I think my median reader probably underestimates my technical ability substantially (for plenty of good reasons, median reader) and probably substantially overestimates... hmm... sales ability. (I'm pretty good at sales, but people probably give me too much credit. I frequently fail to do table-stakes things like aggressively following up to make sure indications of strong interest turn into signed contracts ASAP.)
I endorse using samples of written work as likely indicators of ability, but I don't think the static caste system model of A/B/C players cleaves reality at the joints, and accordingly I don't think that written work likely helpfully buckets people as A/B/C.
[ + ] To forestall the follow-up question, the issue is "Translators/interpreters MUST reproduce the input as closely as they are capable of in the output [even if the input is monstrous or the correct output would contravene other goals of the translator/interpreter]."
I think this is a really dangerous way to reason about aptitude.
As a developer and a startup operator, there are things I'm quite good at. But they're not necessarily the things you'd assume based on what I write publicly. They're definitely not usually the things people say I'm an authority on!
So you have a couple of problems here. Among them, that elite aptitude is multidimensional and probably not very correlated, and that people's public profiles are not a reliable indicator of what dimensions they really excel on. But if you extrapolate a bit from this, it should also occur to you that if my true aptitude† isn't revealed by my public profile, neither is most other people's. How many amazing people are you missing by paying attention only to high-profile people?
† other than for writing overlong message board comments
You didn't actually list things that someone could do to be an "A player", you just mentioned some people you already think are A players. You could easily judge the people you mentioned on the same rubric you bring up and find them wanting.
Patrick for instance (who I pick precisely because I respect him so much) could be crucified by your model ('charge more' is the best bumper sticker ever, he endlessly tells you to add people to your newsletter, lessons learned are his core competency, etc)
For several topics, the guy's blog is high on Google and provides detailed, plain introductions.
Anyway, A player is relative to the league and specific to the skill. Tough to judge from a random blogpost. I guess that should be a platitude, but it's worth repeating.
Fowler was part of the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation system project that was the programming disaster that all the XP people spawned from--thus proving yet again "It's better to fail loudly than succeed quietly".
Fowler seems to have gotten better over the years, but I don't put him in the A-List with people like Rich Hickey or Cliff Click.
> Is there anything in his background that separates this from the low-grade shlock that pollutes my Medium feed on a daily basis?
Considering he posts about his background on his very site, maybe you should do a bit of research before asking such a basic question and sling what amounts to a bunch of insults.
It's hard to trust this comment is from a real "journalist" when it throws so many of my "doesn't do any research and just asks questions to try to be different" flags.
Nothing can be more destructive to a person's competence and skills than an abusive treatment by his superiors. As far as I'm concerned, the true test of leadership is dealing with a subordinate's shortcomings. It's not only about breaking your workers' spirits (and sometimes causing real psychological damage), but also about how to get the best out of your team, taking the abilities of each player into consideration.
What you just described sounds a lot like Peter Drucker's description of management:
"Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant."
It is unfortunately not uncommon to find people who see the world as a fixed bag of A- vs. C-ers (and many of course whom think of themselves in the A category.)
But this is a fixed mindset and I think it correlates (when you get down to it) to one's own private/personal sense of their ability to grow.
You really want to become a rockstar/master/A-player? Don't define yourself by your skill set. Always keep a clear focus on that wide gap between you and what you could be. In other words, always think of yourself as a B-player trying to get to A. Know you'll never get there, but keep trying. Do this, and you'll reach excellence.
You'll also see how little difference there is between you and the "C-"...and then you can collaborate on helping each other toward mastery.
This post touched on an interesting part of human nature. So much of our personality and behavior is based on the identity that we create for ourselves. Most of that gets set in early childhood, but we keep adding to it with our latest experiences at work, with friends, dating, etc.
"Girl didn't like me? Maybe I'm not attractive." Have that experience enough times and it becomes a part of how you view yourself (i.e. your Identity) and you'll behave accordingly. A lot us struggle with identity issues that cause us to act out in unproductive ways, particularly when we're treated badly (like as if we're a c-player the author points out).
I think treating people with respect and giving them the benefit of the doubt as the author advocates is spot on, which is what I suspect is what he meant by treating c-players as a-players.
What I don't think the author meant was that we should treat ALL c-players like a-players as that sounds like an oversimplification. It would only help if someone is actually high potential and their ego and self-esteem issues get in their way. That's far from the only reason people perform poorly. Quite often, someone is simply less capable than the top performers (that flows from the definition of "top" performance). And yes, with experience and practice, people can improve. And it's good to assume they will and give them the guidance they need to get there.
But if you treat someone as if they're better than they really are, they might feel better about themselves but they could also loose the motivation to improve because they're getting the signal that "they're already there" and they'll start to develop a distorted self-image that could lead to other kinds of problems.
People try to live up to the expectations you set for them. From kids to adults. Expect people to be excellent, ask how you can help when they are behind (helps validate the expectation) and celebrate excellent results.
From my experience most people who talk like that are D players themselves. They are just pricks who blame their own failures on the people that work for them.
Most real A players I know are very much into coaching other people and giving them opportunities to grow.
After a certain point, you're throwing good money after bad. Some people just aren't good at certain things, no matter how many chances and coaching you give them.
Maybe what they should have added is "within an acceptable time period".
If it takes a skilled, determined manager (say) 6 months to mould a C player into an A player, then that's a big hit on the manager's time, and an eternity (in the modern fast paced world) before the employee starts delivering the goods. It might not make business sense to make that kind of investment, especially if the typical employee leaves after 2 years.
Sure, if your hypothetical determined manager never expects to need a job elsewhere, is never in a position where a previous employee speaking well of them is useful, doesn't need to hone their mentoring skills and never expects to be in a position where hiring someone who left years ago might be possible.
I think my response would be something like, "You're right, I can't turn them into A people, but they can. That's not my job. My job is to help them get there."
I don't know exactly what the definition of an A / B / C player is, so take this with a grain of salt.
I think managers can give mentorship and advice but it's up to a person to improve themselves. That mostly comes down to attitude, interest and perseverance. Some people just stop themselves from being better, and give themselves arbitrary limits on what topics they won't learn or areas that aren't in the scope of their job.
Agreed. Their preconceptions would ensure that those under them would adhere to that belief as their achievements would probably be discounted and not be given any opportunities to shine. I would remove this person from a managerial position.
"This is so pronounced that if I were to evaluate myself 15 or even 10 years ago, I wouldn’t recognize myself as an A-player. I simply wasn’t one. And yet here I sit looking down at my previous self."
The post fails to define an A, B, or C player, so it felt like a harangue about nothing. Frankly I don't believe that measurement along one axis can capture an individual's impact. Also, discussion of an organization's effects on one's output and attitude is notably absent. Only the manager-direct report relationship is considered.
I guess so, but that's what I mean: The article's meaning depends on one's view. To me, C = inevitable disaster, A = inevitable success, and B is everybody else. With three grades/classes, that's as far as I can get. You have to keep the "A"s happy and prepare for their exit. You have to get rid of the "C"s as soon as you've identified one and given them their fair chances. But I think that your A-B-C scale only addresses those who I consider "B"s, as "A"s and "C"s are mostly immune to management technique.
You should mention that in your article then, keeping in mind that the progression from F to A in most grading systems is linear and that some of us may not see the differences between calibers of engineers in the same way. That said I'm grasping for the grade analogy, as grades are highly dependent on the subject matter and other factors that I'd consider external, and represent a rigid point-in-time assessment.
I recognize that I'll never be Jeff Dean or Sanjay Ghemawat. That's okay, though. There's a much smaller set of things I'm really good at, like debugging. I also get paid acceptably well.
There's a few 10x engineers out there, which I would call A players, but I've only met a couple of them in my lifetime.
- Poorly written and communicated, with faux-profound single word paragraphs
- 'Insights' that would look more at home on a wall decal ("It’s true that I resisted the negativity, escaped, and embraced the positivity and rode it to its potential.")
- "I used to think this way, before I became enlightened" style statements showing complete lack of self-awareness
- Article about a vague concept without defining any of the behaviours that go along with that concept
- Reference to 2x2 matrices (iron law of management theory: all of human behaviour can be collapsed into four quadrants)
- Sign up for my newsletter modal
- His own signature at the end of the post
Is there anything in his background that separates this from the low-grade shlock that pollutes my Medium feed on a daily basis?