Various professional sports take different approaches to evaluate talent, and yet the contributions of athletes in team sports is difficult to predict. The NFL conducts a combine, yet they make gaffes such as drafting Tom Brady as a low draft pick.
Athletes perform in public and are watched by experienced scouts, yet the scouts did not accurately predict how well Duncan Keith would perform.
Billy Bean famously upended baseball scouting by switching to metrics that predicted success better than the subjective evaluations of scouts.
Is it easier to predict performance in individual sports, such as track and field, golf, or tennis?
Did Dan Marino ever win a superbowl? No. To what extent does this reflect his ability? Is it the quarterback's fault if a team does not have a good running game?
In business, we mostly perform in private and performance is much less amenable to evaluation with metrics. Also, business is largely a team sport.
The larger the team, the more likely that individual performance can be expected to vary from predictions.
Given the extensive advantages that professional sports teams have over traditional businesses in evaluating talent, and the errors that they make in those evaluations, what would lead us to believe that businesses have any hope of properly evaluating software developers?
Is there a way to structure work that avoids the requirement for accurate evaluation? Is there a way to be robust or even anti-fragile to evaluations? There are articles that discuss how 10x engineers are only 10x in a certain context.
Agile is an attempt to be robust to estimation errors. Estimation should only be used to get in the ballpark. Maybe the same is true of evaluation? Should the goals of software developer evaluation vary depending on factors of the hiring team (size, maturity, experience with the problem domain, maturity of the problem domain pioneers/settlers/town planners).
It is funny to hear the scouting reports for athletes like Tom Brady and Aaron Rogers. The scouts said many negative things about the people who were to become some of the best quarterbacks ever.
Sunday, May 27, 2018
Cubicles are a High Tech Favela
My AVP (Area Vice President) told me today that my cube is a shared resource and needed to be centrally coordinated with the office manager. This supposedly explained why it took 3 weeks for me to get permission to move to another cubicle when I was transferred to a different team.
This made me realize that I have no ownership, no equity, in the place where I spend the majority of my waking life. It reminded me of the work that won Hernando de Soto the Nobel Prize in Economics. He demonstrated that the reason for generational poverty in Peru is because the squatters in impoverished areas have no property rights and therefore cannot pass their property to their heirs. They can build businesses and enjoy the fruits of the business while they live, but they cannot legally pass the title. Thus, the equity dies with the founder.
This is also true when you work for someone else. You can make a living so long as you are employed, but you take nothing with you when you leave and cannot pass any title to your heirs.
Of course, the AVP made the mistake of breaking the fourth wall by reminding me that I am not an owner. All of the agents of a company should want the employees to behave like owners, which is easier if they feel some level of ownership.
This made me realize that I have no ownership, no equity, in the place where I spend the majority of my waking life. It reminded me of the work that won Hernando de Soto the Nobel Prize in Economics. He demonstrated that the reason for generational poverty in Peru is because the squatters in impoverished areas have no property rights and therefore cannot pass their property to their heirs. They can build businesses and enjoy the fruits of the business while they live, but they cannot legally pass the title. Thus, the equity dies with the founder.
This is also true when you work for someone else. You can make a living so long as you are employed, but you take nothing with you when you leave and cannot pass any title to your heirs.
Of course, the AVP made the mistake of breaking the fourth wall by reminding me that I am not an owner. All of the agents of a company should want the employees to behave like owners, which is easier if they feel some level of ownership.
How good should Adele's guitarist be?
If an act is a vocal act, the guitar and all of the other instruments are there to complement the singer, not distract from her.
Same with the focus for a product. The main feature needs to differentiate the product. The rest of the features are supporting acts that must not overshadow the main feature.
But if the guitarist was better, maybe you could get guitar fans to come to Adele concerts. But you would start to lose the vocal fans who don't want to sit through long guitar solos. The guitar fans can go see Kenny Wayne Sheppard.
Adele has a good guitarist, but he knows how to support and complement the vocals. KWS has a good lead singer, but he does not overshadow the guitar.
Same with the focus for a product. The main feature needs to differentiate the product. The rest of the features are supporting acts that must not overshadow the main feature.
But if the guitarist was better, maybe you could get guitar fans to come to Adele concerts. But you would start to lose the vocal fans who don't want to sit through long guitar solos. The guitar fans can go see Kenny Wayne Sheppard.
Adele has a good guitarist, but he knows how to support and complement the vocals. KWS has a good lead singer, but he does not overshadow the guitar.
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