-- Steve Jobs
I worked for a VP and CTO who embraced this advice literally: They wanted to hire smart people and have them decide what would be done. They took it to so much of an extreme that they washed their hands of the responsibility for deciding and executing anything. Their job, they thought, was to call us to meetings and then ask a lot of questions about what we were going to do.
The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted.
Instead, it was never-ending circles of Socratic method questions: What do you need to succeed? How will your team accomplish that? Who can you talk to make that happen? Whenever we tried to make it clear that we needed them to do some work in the organization, we got a lecture about learning how to be self sufficient and get things done ourselves.
Not surprisingly, little got done. We wrote the software fine, but any time we encountered issues that required VP or C-level collaboration we hit a wall. You can only defer to IC employees to tell you what to do for so long. Beyond that point it’s just laziness.
This is also a stark contrast to how Steve Jobs actually operated, which by all accounts was extremely demanding, dismissive, and command-and-control with him at the center.
But in researching this, it’s all pretty ambiguous but a decently relevant HBR article came out of it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150209203853/https://hbr.org/2...
The quote does say "I" so there is an inherent assumption there. The problem with taking any quote and "best practice" at face value that can be applied anywhere is always incorrect.
> There's a few Steve Jobs quotes which have tanked the tech industry.
So hence it's like the hype trains an social media driven development. People need to think. Don't blame Jobs for it.
That doesn't stop people trying.
> The problems became immediately apparent when we lacked the organizational authority to actually get important things done. We could write the software, but we needed the VP and CTO to actually use their positions in meetings to get agreement from other departments about the important cross-organizational factors of getting software implemented and adopted.
Would it be fair to diagnose this as an issue where the tech side of the business ran in an open, proactive way but other departments had a top-down mentality that required interfacing with the head of your department?
In other words - do you think it is a necessary/desirable feature that ICs need organizational authority from the CTO to push major changes? I get that given how the rest of the org functioned, it would have been much better to have more top-down mentality from the CTO. But is there a better equilibrium where this is not required?
If tech is trying to make changes that impact another major business area, and chaos needs to be avoided, then if you want to avoid executives being involved then members of that org need to be empowered to agree on those changes. However if you do that without structure it’s easy to just end up with organizational chaos as you wind up massively multiplying the communication channels that need to be pushed lower in the org. Someone needs to limit and direct the people responsible for those decisions if they’re not going to make them themselves.
You have to become a superstar first.
I had the good luck of living down the street from the AirBedAndBreakfast founders in San Francisco in 2008 and we'd commute together to our Tuesday night YC dinners in Mountainview.
I picked up early that Nate was already a superstar coder, Joe was a superstar designer, and Brian was a superstar designer and salesman.
I knew I was not, and had to double down and practice, practice, practice.
Craftsmanship comes first. It took those guys decades of practice at their crafts before they founded AirBedAndBreakfast.
Think of Paul Graham. Before he created HackerNews and YC, he had already written and published a book on Lisp! A master craftsman.
Craftsmanship comes first.
If you are not a master at your craft, don't even waste your time trying to recruit superstars. Instead, spend your time on practice.
I’m starting to think paying attention to what is happening is undervalued.
Realistically tell yourself that 10x developers are a silly myth and the people you were able to hire for pennies from the local demographic are the superstars, and try not to hang your business model on them actually being the best in their field. As long as you don't fact check that against reality it'll be OK.
Thankfully almost no one is the best in their field :) You probably can't afford the best, you probably don't need the best, you probably can't keep the best happy, you definitely don't have problems that need the best.
That being said if you pay dollars instead of pennies you can find some decent folks and maybe save some money in the long run :)
But companies should be honest with themselves about what they need. Everyone still seems obsessed with being able to pretend they somehow got the absolute best deal on the employment market instead of interviewing for the position itself.
/s
