High Performance Individuals and Teams

Growing up, the only thing that put me off while learning software development, was the common occurrence of people who cared more about one upping others with their trivia knowledge rather than actually building things.

At the start of my career I had a difficult time differentiating between them and actual top performers because the industry still thought there was a strong correlation between jerks and highly productive people. Employers used to be afraid something will go wrong if they fired a mythical 10x engineer and no one else understood how to fix their systems.

After 15 years what I've learned is that engineers that produce orders of magnitude more than others exist, but the way they are talked about is overly exaggerated. They’re usually not jerks either, at least not more than the rest of the population.

If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god.

One thing we don’t often consider is that you don’t have to hire the very top of the field to find people that are orders better than the industry average. Even more important than finding great engineers is to avoid bad ones.

Being obsessed with finding a 10x engineer, is to be obsessed with shortcuts and Hail Marys. It will hurt you in the long run if you’re focusing on that instead of building solid fundamentals.

Ultimately I am convinced that focusing on building teams is more important than finding individual outliers. Of course the John Carmacks, the Jeff Deans, the Fabrice Bellards, of the industry exist, but your startup isn’t going to die if you don’t find one. It will die if you don’t build a good team.

Good reads on individual and team performance

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/32NYkRC