[fkdjs]

As someone who is on the 'high performer' list, I can tell you I have seen this first hand and this is fine, we will work harder, provided we're given an even more outrageous salary. Otherwise, I'm going to get burned out doing the job of my coworkers / thinking for my coworkers every day, monitoring them so they're more efficient and don't go off chasing down bugs incorrectly. I don't need to be managed, leave me alone and I'll make customers and your boss'es boss happy. But this all can get tiresome and it sucks. But give me that bonus/salary and I'll continue on like a trooper.

At my last job, I was given more and more work, and I made everything work without intervention, but I left due to low pay, now the old boss wants to hire me back as the old system seems to go down a lot, while his cheap labor source turns out to be more expensive than he first thought. There seems to be a belief that we can just whip up the high performers when we need them, but this just leads to burn out and turnover. just pay the high performers an ungodly amount and all will be well.

[SatvikBeri]

High performers are still a great deal, because you can pay them 2x the salary to get 10x the results. Few places realize this, but the ones that do are wonderful to work for.

[michaelochurch]

High performers are still a great deal, because you can pay them 2x the salary to get 10x the results.

The issue, for many companies, is that the perks the high performers want in exchange for this "arbitrage" that exists in hiring them-- very high levels of autonomy, rapid career advancement, implicit trust from the first day of work-- are considered unaffordable in the actual political context of the company.

Companies won't give high performers 10x salaries because the high performer might not deliver if the conditions are bad, but if they give them high degrees of autonomy and interesting projects, that's visible to the less adept workers and it becomes an issue for management. Managers know that if they let their best people follow different rules, everyone will expect the same freedom.

High and low performance don't seem to be intrinsic to people, in the sense that mediocre people can turn excellent given the right conditions, and vice versa. What does seem to be intrinsic is that there are high- and low-variance people. Low variance people are reliable ladder-climbers, and high variance people are the creative ones who might have a mediocre year or two, but then have a huge breakthrough. The top performers are, for the most part, high variance individuals. High-variance people can also fail quite badly, in certain circumstances, so companies are very nervous about hiring them at all. The "corporate ladder" rewards reliable mediocrity, not intermittent excellence.

Intimidation-based management (which has been dominant since 1800) regresses performance to the mean, and its purpose is to reduce variance. When the input-output curves relating skill and effort to productivity were concave, variance-reduction was the way to go, because lower variance was equivalent to higher performance. Now that we're in a convex world (at least in software) variance-reduction fails us.

[fkdjs]

That's a bit of a generalization. Some anecdotal evidence... years ago when I was but a youngin', I didn't get along at my company, got burned out and eventually curled up in a corner and slept/played games. Needless to say I got on the PIP (performance improvement plan). Then I got laid off eventually. I was immature. My manager sucked, but so did I for not realizing this and taking action.

These days, I am simply more mature, and I regret my past somewhat, but at least I am good at learning in general. If you don't regret your past, you aren't growing, everyone does. Now, after life has kicked me around, I know people well, I know how not to be a condescending jackass, and be pleasant, and get things done, and communicate to my manager honestly vs being passive aggressive etc. And I have that same inner drive to figure things out. I'm still the same person, I just don't bullshit around, I keep my mouth shut, impress people with my actions, then lo and behold, when they come to find out more info about me, I tell them, but before that, I remain an enigma. When I came to my group, some underestimated me, I didn't lash out like when I was younger, I just shut up and fixed their bugs.

I do think, as you allude to, certain people just have that knowing, they have it in them, but for whatever reason, maturity, bad manager, etc., they don't rise to the top. I think though, if you are mature, you will realize your manager is crappy right away and address that. Part of being a star performer, to me, is not just tech. ability, but non-technical ability.