[LarsDu88]

I moved over to Silicon Valley fairly late (in 2018), and I was immediately shocked at how frowned upon... even disincentivized technical knowledge was at the management level.

To the extent that people started removing hard numbers from their presentations and replacing them with smiley faces.

Needless to say, I left and that company TANKED.

I think Steve Jobs said something about A people versus C people... well he was right (even though he was bullshitting, b/c as we all know, Wozniak had the A team at Apple, and Jobs at the C team)

[tmn]

Curious, can you expand on your jobs vs woz take. My impression is they were both A players with entirely different competencies

[psunavy03]

A teams will crush A people every day and twice on Sundays. The lone wolf 10x dev myth needs to die. This is not 1994.

[gilbetron]

The A/B/C quote isn't about lone wolf devs, but is "A players hire A players, B players hire C players". Meaning really good devs want to work with other really good devs, but mediocre devs want to work with crappy devs to make themselves look better.

I still think it is kind of full of bunk, although it has some truth. A players do typically want to work with A players, but a lot of "B" players just want to have a mildly interesting job where they don't kill themselves and are happy to hire and be around other B players with the same attitude.

[psunavy03]

I've worked in software and I've flown jets off an aircraft carrier. Egos are not an unfamiliar concept. And while there are "A" players, there are also arrogant prima donnas who think they're "A" players, which is why I'm skeptical of sentences like this.

In my previous life, there were plenty of people who could water your eyes in the jet, but who couldn't mentor or bring along new folks to save their lives. Which made them useless in the long term because they couldn't train their replacement.

The real gold are the "A" players who can mentor "B" players into becoming "A" players. Because in any field, there are three kinds of people. The natural freaks of nature who need no help, the vast middle, and the incompetent who shouldn't be there. Organizations who crush it understand that they need the best team players out of Group 1 to mentor the crap out of as much of Group 2 as they can, and they only need to fire Group 3. But the prima donnas of Group 1 make it sound like they can carry an organization . . . and they largely can't.

[marcellus23]

I don't think "we all know" that.

[rib3ye]

I think it's well-understood Jobs as an S-tier salesperson.