Comment by dvirsky
5 years ago
My general experience, at least in start-ups, has been the exact opposite. In a good company with great culture and good compensation, strong talent was usually in for the long haul, and those who don't find their place leave after a year or so.
In bad companies that's not true of course, so perhaps this can be a good measure of company quality - if their top talent are indeed good and are there for a long period of time, it's a very positive signal.
One example I can think of is Redis Labs - the core group of engineers have been with the company for almost a decade, and these guys are some of the nicest, most humble and most talented engineers I've ever met (And of course there's antirez who's in a league of his own).
I violently agree with you.
The most important thing you can do during a job interview is to as best you can figure out who the talented people are and how long they've been at the company. If the most talented people are the people who have been there the longest, it's a good sign. If the people who have been there the longest don't seem to do any technical work and seem like powerpoint monkeys, it's a dire warning sign that the company is deeply dysfunctional.
In any case, the "Dead Sea Effect" is not a general truth, it's only true in dysfunctional organizations. The author of the linked post seems to be a consultant who helps failing IT organizations turn the ship around. I think his experience has led him to self-select into the dysfunctional ones.
This makes sense.
A good company will appreciate talent, enable it, recognize any lack of it, and create some form of community. So it's a bad place to be a vampire, but a great place to be talented.
A bad company will fail to appreciate or enable talent, not notice vampires, and have no real community. Great place to clock in and get a paycheck, but not very fulfilling.
Talented people tend to be driven by interest at least enough that it's worth it to do things they're interested in.