> even if you think the top employees are doing the work of 2 people each, or even 3 people (which is a lot to expect of anyone)
Claim: in software or engineering, your top employees are doing the work of a thousand people, or an infinite ratio of some of their fellow employees. No combination of administrative assistants at Google is going to program Google Chrome or even a sorting algorithm. No combination of HR people is capable of calculating structural loads.
Claim: (more arguable on Hacker News). Successfully managing a medium or large organization is likewise a skill shared by very few people. Managing humans is like programming on the most testy and finicky AWS nodes you could ever imagine. They don't do what they're told, they do other things, and they may return wrong results. You are responsible for making sure the group performs as a whole. This is engineering of a different sort.
There is a fundamental impedance mismatch between the amount of dollars required to sustain life (outside of serious health issues, this does not greatly vary from person to person) and the dollar productivity of each individual.
Arguably every great tech organization (commercial or non-commercial) has a few people who are 1000, 10000, or 1 million times as productive as others. People like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Jeff Dean, Urs Holzle, Guido van Rossum, or DHH. That is how they became great tech or engineering organizations.
The Bell Curve may describe the population distribution of intelligence (though ability on any given trait may be different). But as a manager or recruiter your duty is to select highly nonuniformly from the right tail of that curve. Your ability distribution should be as radically right skewed as possible, and should not really resemble a bell curve.
In short, "equal bonuses for all" -- with the same amount going to both the guy who didn't do much work and the guy who picked up after him -- is a great way to demotivate your best people. And this will cost you a lot more than 2-3 of your medium employees, it will cost you a guy who did 1000X their work, and perhaps it will cost your whole business. All that matters are your best, with them you can rebuild anything.
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> even if you think the top employees are doing the work of 2 people each, or even 3 people (which is a lot to expect of anyone)
Claim: in software or engineering, your top employees are doing the work of a thousand people, or an infinite ratio of some of their fellow employees. No combination of administrative assistants at Google is going to program Google Chrome or even a sorting algorithm. No combination of HR people is capable of calculating structural loads.
Claim: (more arguable on Hacker News). Successfully managing a medium or large organization is likewise a skill shared by very few people. Managing humans is like programming on the most testy and finicky AWS nodes you could ever imagine. They don't do what they're told, they do other things, and they may return wrong results. You are responsible for making sure the group performs as a whole. This is engineering of a different sort.
There is a fundamental impedance mismatch between the amount of dollars required to sustain life (outside of serious health issues, this does not greatly vary from person to person) and the dollar productivity of each individual.
Arguably every great tech organization (commercial or non-commercial) has a few people who are 1000, 10000, or 1 million times as productive as others. People like Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Jeff Dean, Urs Holzle, Guido van Rossum, or DHH. That is how they became great tech or engineering organizations.
The Bell Curve may describe the population distribution of intelligence (though ability on any given trait may be different). But as a manager or recruiter your duty is to select highly nonuniformly from the right tail of that curve. Your ability distribution should be as radically right skewed as possible, and should not really resemble a bell curve.
In short, "equal bonuses for all" -- with the same amount going to both the guy who didn't do much work and the guy who picked up after him -- is a great way to demotivate your best people. And this will cost you a lot more than 2-3 of your medium employees, it will cost you a guy who did 1000X their work, and perhaps it will cost your whole business. All that matters are your best, with them you can rebuild anything.
"All that matters are your best"
I agree with some of your ideas, but in my humble opinion, this attitude will cost you your business faster than anything.
Yea, but that can be solved by using separate bonuses for each role.