Comment by jamestimmins
2 years ago
Reminds me of an anecdote about Bell Labs. Someone calculated who the most productive employees were (based on things like patents received), and found that many of them would eat lunch with the same person. That person wasn't individually very productive, but he would always ask thoughtful, compelling questions that in turn made his coworkers measurably more productive.
It might be from the great book The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner (p 135).
The most impressive thing about this story is that they figured out the answer. They did the research, and nailed down that it was Nyquist who was was the productivity booster. It’s the exact opposite of the OP’s story, where management tried to fire the Nyquist-equivalent.
They found an answer that felt right to them. The reseachers weren't blinded to the context they were working in, and their hypothesis is essentially unfalsifiable so I would take it with a grain of salt.
All they figured out was that the smart people hung out together.
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Honestly, I'm kind of skeptical of the answer. I'm not saying that talking with Nyquist wouldn't be useful, probably it was, but what's stopping a dozen other things at least that useful from being part of the answer?
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It’s a lovely story but a prime candidate for “correlation !== causation”.
Harry Nyquist isn't exactly an unknown engineer who doesn't have his own achievements, though - not sure why people are saying he would be fired in a modern company!
He doesn’t have his own achievements?
I have heard of the Nyquist frequency, the nyquist limit, the nyquist sampling rate and the Shannon nyquist theorem.
As far as I know no other individual has had this many “things” named after him.
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In the modern company good engineers are not valued.
Engineering excellence is not a prerequisite to business success. Managers know this.
Why else many things any one of us could list from the computing business.
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Reminds me of the adage of “solving the problem is the hard part, the hard part is figuring out the right problem to solve”.
I always remember as “questions are harder than answers”.
Wiki says it is this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nyquist
Woah. He has a huge list of "Known for"!
Yeah that's the one! Thanks for finding the reference.
Rumour has it Nyquist was promised to be on 18 breakfasts a day to placate investors after a slow quarter.
You also need a fertile soil. In many many places, curiosity, exploration is passively frowned upon.
That kind of people was somehow mentioned in Peopleware. A group of people is a subtle structure, and good team spirit, good questions can improve things "invisibly".
This type of person needs to start a company, they never get paid a fair wage otherwise
True for most of the working class, whose surplus labor value is siphoned away by capital.
For all a lot of people dump on Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches . . . this is part of who the good ones are supposed to be.
Oh No!
Good people amplifiers are domain/technical experts; Scrum Masters/Agile Coaches are neither.
Nope.
The best amplifier I've met was hired as a junior coder to my team and was paired with a couple of 10x coders on a project with a client who was "hands-on" and loved to micro-manage, having been a software developer themselves a long time ago.
The Amplifier's coding output wasn't that good, but the team as a whole was doing better than before so I investigated.
Turns out the 10x guys weren't that keen on communicating with ... well anyone outside of the team, much less with non-technical clients (or technical clients who loved micromanage). Both were your stereotypical cold pizza and warm cola coders with limited social skills. They could kinda sorta manage the meetings and emails directly from customers but didn't exactly relish it.
The junior hire was more like a 0.5x coder, but had ample social and organisation skills and worked extremely well as a liaison between the team and any external contacts they needed, taking over most "useless" meetings with the product owner and customer.
The junior coder ended up receiving some training and was "promoted" to a Scrum Master/Producer/Project Manager (the exact title escapes me) for the team. Everyone was happy and productive.
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I'm sure your bubble is a wonderful place for you to exist. I can't speak for anyone who has to interact with you, but inside of it, I'm sure it's great.
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If anything many seem super green with 1-2 years tech experience.
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Do people honestly think this kind of thing replicates with formally scheduled Zoom 1:1s? I don’t.
I don't know about you, but I don't tend to have breakfast and lunch over Zoom.
While I did go out to lunch with coworkers more often while working in the office it was almost exclusively with direct teammates, and other groups I occasionally saw where also on the same team.
Now that I'm fully remote, I will typically do a few "hacking sessions" over Zoom every week. Its much easier and more comfortable than standing over their shoulder in tiny cubes we used to have.
That said, especially now that i am fully remote, I've been trying and mostly failing to get developers especially across teams to talk and collaborate more. But its not too suprising: I was recently in a call and I was introduced to another developer who I replied, "Yeah, I know you. I was in the cube next to you for 2 years and on your team for 6 months."
Remote creates some new challenges, but its a culture thing, not a technology thing.
FWIW, I schedule coffee with colleagues over zoom.
It's not the same as having lunch together but it is enjoyable and useful.
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My thoughts were that neither of them should have been surprised by the rating. When a rating comes in substantially different than expected, it's usually because A) They aren't talking during the week B) The manager is weak and doesn't want to issue corrections when they meet C) The employee isn't asking "How am I doing?" during their meetings D) It's being directed from upper management for obscure reasons.
That is a catalyst!