Those 10% quit the moment they were offered an ultimatum. If you're one of the 10% of people who are holding up a company, you quit when an asshole boss comes around. You got plenty of other companies who you'd rather work for.

If you're an engineer of any caliber, even in this economy, you simply don't have to put up with any of this crap at all. And there's no reason to sign on (or stay on) to a company that treats you like this.

> So, when you continually slice away the bad portions of something, all that you're left with is 1 of 2 potential outcomes:

False dichotomy. There's #3.

#3: Everyone who was holding up the company, the "10% who do all the work", switched jobs and is now working for Facebook across the street.

Some engineers like George Hotz seem onboard with the new approach. I have no doubt some there are a couple hundred talented developers in the USA who would not only be fine, but enjoy the challenge.

My company has a "special operations task force" of disagreeable highly technical 10x to 100x engineers who come onto failing projects, fix them, and leave. These guys enjoy (almost unbelievably) extremely hard projects, and working 18-20 hr days to fix messes. They once took over a conference room for 2 weeks, and slept and showered in the company while fixing a major product.

I'm a manager for a high performance team but not that high performance. I have list of at least 100 names of high profile performance developers we keep an eye on.

https://twitter.com/peterclowes/status/1593458225533313025

> Finally, there was no retention plan for those that stayed. No clear upside for sticking it through the storm on the horizon. Just “trust us” style verbal promises. But tweeps overall were untrusting after the 7 months of acquisition drama, recent tweets, and leaks etc.

> So my friends are gone, the vision is murky, there is a storm coming and a no financial upside. What would you do? Would you sacrifice time with your kids over the holidays for vague assurances and the opportunity to make a rich person richer or would you take the out?

--------

What's Elon Musk's vision here? Does he even have a plan? That's the most outstanding part of this all. It has become blatantly obvious that Elon _HAS NO PLAN_.

Its one thing to work for 20-hour days when you know what to do. But what is the plan for Twitter? The plan was "Come to the office on Friday to give Elon Musk a rundown on the code".

For anyone who has worked in difficult circumstances, this has to be one of the worst "visions" offered to "Hardcore" engineers ever. Or is the "vision" seriously just "keep Twitter running over the weekend" ??

And then what? Next week comes, and you'll need that herculean effort to once again keep Twitter open for just another week.

You're not getting paid any extra. All your friends have left. Institutional knowledge and trusted friends are gone. The boss is a nitwit who doesn't even understand the code, and there's no plan for what Twitter will be next week, let alone next year. (Shadowbans? Or not? Paid $8 blue checkmarks? Or not? There's a distinct lack of mission here).

Its not worth it to put in 20 hour days when the boss can't even decide if $8 blue / grey checkmarks are a good or bad idea.

A job that engages will get the best out of people, whether they are internally or externally motivated. Even internally motivated people will stop living up to their potential if their job role doesn't change to keep them engaged.

The problem might not be the people, the problem might be the roles. Yet Musk, like most others, is firing the people instead of firing the roles.

You mean Meta? The company that froze hiring and just laid off 11,000 employees?

See the Twitter Android engineer / accessibility team guy who got fired publicly on Twitter last week, instantly got a bunch of job offers.

Yeah "Want to go hardcore, click 'Yes'.". Hardcore to where, doofus?

This idea of 10% and 90% is fundamentally wrong. It’s like saying the only meaningful part of a gear system is the meshing teeth. That’s after all where all the magic happens. But the interior of the gear is importing to position the teeth correctly. Where the gear attaches is more crucial - you can function fine with a few broken teeth but if the attachment is too tight or too lose it won’t work. More importantly the empty space in the system is crucial to the function.

I think the ratio is generally reversed - 90% of the people are making the magic happen, and 10% are redundant. It’s true there’s always a small percentage of folks that demonstrate remarkable effectiveness, but they can’t do that without the rest of the team essentially carrying out the work they are too valuable to be distracted from. They provide the cover, the headroom, and while the exceptional performers are force multipliers, there must be a force to multiply. They can’t multiply themselves alone. A good manager knows how to integrate those people into the rest of the gear system such that their force multiplication is magnified to its maximum. But the force itself is not redundant.

Due to their rarity the force multiplying engineers make more money and receive outsized recognition. The same is true for say a star quarterback (I know nothing about sportsball fwiw). The quarterback is famous and compensated better than the rest of the team if they’re amazing. But they can’t win the game alone.

The other thing to note about exceptional engineers, which I modestly count myself as one after many years of impostor syndrome, they can’t stand bullshit and absurd decision making. They also respect and even love their coworkers and team and will go to no end to see them individually successful. They are generally not mercenaries nor are they obsessively driven by a vision at all cost. There are very competent engineers who are like that. But they tend to be poisonous to the team and largely ineffectual because they’re not force multipliers. More than anything, no one trusts them - not even other engineers like them. They usually get stuck midcareer and either become bitter and withdrawn or end up as the star at some small shop that couldn’t afford a truly amazing engineer.

Now, I don’t work at twitter and never have. They might not be a serious engineering shop and his strategy is to dynamite the existing culture and rebuild it as a more serious engineering shop. But that won’t be successful if he can’t recognize the value of the 90%. And he shouldn’t fool himself that his force multipliers clicked yes. He ended up with people in precarious personal situations that can’t afford to lose their job and mercenaries that were bitter how they were marginalized while the force multipliers were magnified.

He will have a lot of rebuilding, and building of trust once lost is the hardest to rebuild of all. These events can haunt recruiting efforts for decades.

This is incredibly difficult and I think more represents the ideal, rather than a consistently achievable reality (at least I have never actually seen this in my own experience). Inevitably your upper leadership becomes infiltrated and then taken over by people who's primary skill is gaming the system of incentives. Once entrenched, they are difficult if not impossible to remove, and jealously gatekeep against anyone more competent that might threaten their position from below. New ideas and reforms are seen as threats, as most of the leadership is only interested in these things to the extent that they might provide an opportunity to increase their own social status, wealth, or power. In a company, this is takes on the form of the depressingly banal, but it is as true at the highest levels of power in every state and such things are behind many of the human-initiated catastrophes we see throughout recorded history.

To your point about the 90/10 ratio, I really don't get the sense that Elon thinks this way at all, however. I also agree that I don't think he is really getting the people he wants. As you said, those that would be most likely to stay under these circumstances are those who can't really go somewhere else (like those with a visa) or who are workaholics. Neither of these neatly intersect with the group of productive and skilled engineers and support staff. Instead of gross competency you are selecting for the desperate and the pathological.

This is why most of us could never be in the kind of position like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They see things for what they are and make the cold calculations. They still make mistakes but are directionally correct.

Power laws like the Pareto principle assert themselves unless you actively push against them. Twitter was not. Everyone knew they were overstaffed for years. The 50% cut when Elon took over had little effect. They were not a lean machine where the 90% were pulling the weight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I also said if the goal is to rebuild twitters culture in a different mold then this is a way to do it. But it is not about identifying the 10%, it’s about identifying the people who map to the intended culture. That’s fine too. But they are driving away the force multipliers by doing this, and creating a reputation that will drive them away. That’s because force multipliers necessarily love the people individually they work with. They aren’t making the cold calculations you’re talking about, and they are generally repulsed by them. And you can’t have an excellent engineering culture based on mercenaries.

You don’t have to believe me. This is just my observations after decades of being involved in these things directly and being the one making the cold calculations.

What she also ended up doing is to smooth over tense situations between very competent people who are working in a high-stake environment where the urge to lash out/to fight for your vision above others' is getting increasingly strong as fatigue sets in.

That value isn't written down in her performance review. Yet, she's diffused a number of conflicts, allowing easier/quicker resolution of issues in a business where a mistake can (will) cost thousands of dollars. Because she's more approachable than her cross-shift, her subordinates are also more susceptible to ask her if they don't know something, instead of doing a potentially costly mistake or letting suboptimal situations carry on.

Personal skill-wise, she's not a magical 10% -- she's decently skilled, still learning her trade. However, she does help multiply everyone's performance.

As parent said, a gear needs many parts to turn.

"Get here in 3 hours or you're fired" is just trying to humiliate people, it's not even pretending to be a technical challenge.

Sad to see someone so non understanding add the "ah yes the people who are 10x as strong as others, just only held back" shtick and then to see it echoed as "yes, I think that IS what is going on"

This is someone who believes they are part of the 10% failing to see the value of the 90%, arrogantly mistaking their own ignorance for insight.

John Carmack and George Hotz have a different opinion.

Corporate structures, job roles and freedoms, and management, have a pronounced impact on how productive individual employees are. It's not just the employee's traits themselves.

It is true that US culture tends to place responsibility on individuals to manage their lot in life. This should be the case, but I think the US goes overboard.

"You're responsible for your performance as an employee, I'm not responsible for what I did to make your performance as an employee easy or difficult. Except, of course, I am responsible for unleashing the talent of the arbitrarily chosen top 10%."

Who is going to do the tasks that Carmack is too smart and important to do?

As others have said, that 10% has already left. If you know your value, you simply don’t accept bad working conditions (i.e., 100% on-site work, long working hours, etc.)

That 10% will have zero problems finding a decent job.