Things break down when the team and management stop listening. That's when the superstar actually gets frustrated and leaves.

Truth is, when it comes to a competition between two groups, it's almost always two bunches of mediocres sprinkled with one or two superstars. The group that wins is the one that listens to their superstars. This applies in war, in sports and in the corporate world.

If management expect people to just listen to the superstar directly it’s terrible, as the superstar has no time to do the actual work and is expected to lead instead.

That is the easiest way to kill talent, and strange enough most people are encouraged to go this way to grow within the company.

The best thing management can do is to listen to Steve Jobs: "the best managers are the great IC who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because nobody else is going to be able to do as good as jobs as them". [Youtube ID QplyFXgIx7Q].

All the old management are still in place despite several ceo changes and it has become the poster child for failed big company.

you can even read the glass door reviews. Thousands of posts say the same thing I am saying: The bad people gang up on the good people and that’s why I left.

Then he left, started a 30 person company, got frustrated, quit and built another game entirely from scratch doing all the art direction and sold millions then retired.

One person.

[Edit: I was trying to make a joke reference but after reviewing the facts, no it doesn't look like the person referenced was Chris Sawyer of Rollercoaster Tycoon fame. He could fit the description though]

I guess this can varies per company. It’s not difficult to be a super star in a dinosaur company. After all, “In The Land of The Blind, The One Eyed Man is King.”

This is really common in many European companies. Most developers are doing the bare minimum and it’s common for the department to be carryover by a single guy that is passionate by software development.

My understanding is that people don’t put any effort because of a mix of factors: no technical career; low salaries; no financial reward for putting extra effort; management is mostly non technical and don’t value developers; companies can’t increase salary for a single individual in the same role because of unions or country laws; people can’t be easily fired; etc.

It is extremely hard to be a superstar in a dinosaur company, if we are talking about software development.

The thing to consider is called "technical debt." You will not believe what can be accumulated through years if technical debt is not addressed. And usually it is not properly addressed, of course.

Or they just plain don't care about software engineering and just do bare minimum for salary.

Are you sure you've got a "superstar" there?

I think the term ought to be reserved for people who truly do a lot of good work, and not the many varieties of people who manage to make it look like they're doing lots of good work. Which absolutely exist, and need terminology to talk about them, and sharing strategies to deal with them is a good thing to do. But while I'm sure there's a non-zero set of people who are both superstars and very good at giving the appearance of doing a lot of work and being very political about it, I doubt there are many. That's a very particular order off the metaphorical menu of attributes.

I would expect a real superstar to be happy to find that you can carry a meaningful portion of the load. There is always more work to do than can be done. Being able to not do some of it allows them to focus somewhere else.

A real superstar would empower the team with that extra sprinkle of confidence so they can tackle the cool projects and succeed. They should be SWAT, not Mayor.

I’m sorry you feel this way and you should bring this up with your manager.

Because when the "team" undoubtedly fails, it falls on shoulders of the superstar to fix it.

I feel you need pace setters but not excessively reward individual heroics.

So what you have isn't a superstar. That's a jerk who will burn out fast and your management isn't responsive enough.

How do they get to "take" as an IC.

Yeah this is spot on. My time in engineering has taught me that the world is falling apart, always and forever. There is a relentless decay eating everything around you and it's often only the heroic acts of surprisingly few high-quality people that keep it going to tomorrow.

Those people are rare, perhaps around 0.5-5% of the population or less depending on where you draw the boundaries. But they can be found in all different walks of life. I know one that was a UPS driver for 30 years. Not a remarkable profession, but he is a remarkable guy. School was about the only thing he wasn't a high-performer in with the exception of high-school sports. But he can solve basically any problem. Even those out of his depth, because he knows when something is out of his depth and he also knows who to pull in to consult. He knows EVERYONE and everyone that knows him owes him a favor because he uses his undying energy and hard work to help them all. At work, they begged him to become a manager but he refused the position over and over. But they would screen every new hire through him to see if they were worth keeping. When something would go wrong, they called him. I remember one instance when there was an interruption to the entire local area fuel AND power supply and the warehouse was therefore out of operation because their backup generators didn't have enough fuel. So... they just called him in the middle of the night and by God, he had the problem solved by 4 am that day and still showed up for work. His breadth of skill and knowledge is also incredible, but I'll save the reader some time and omit those stories.

Despite being rare gems of people, you paradoxically seem to run into these people everywhere because they tend to be so prolific and well connected. Effective managers learn to just funnel their problems through these people with enough lead time to keep the whole team operational.

The corrosive forces of the ocean combined with what-ever-that-is growing on your bottom hull reminds you it’s a constant battle between human nature and Mother Nature.

Then the talent gets fed up and leave, leaving a mere "cover band" behind, unable to replicate the magic beyond what an average amateur band could do.

Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.

I’d like to do what you do in the future and I’m just curious.

In Germany, there's still an almost endless supply of companies who urgently need to digitise their customer interactions so that they can react quickly to customer orders. A 2 week lead time for PCBs, for example, just doesn't work anymore if the Chinese competition is not only cheaper, but can DHL Express to anywhere within 7 days. Or imagine you want to book catering for an event next week but the local bakery insists that you should have faxed an order form to their central management 10 days in advance. You'd be surprised how much revenue boost some companies see just from a rudimentary Shopify order form with Stripe+PayPal online payment.

Or another classic is automating document inflow. You put all forms of type X into an automated scanner and that'll send the files to a network share and then a cronjob will name the files and sort them for you. Not only do you save one employee (e.g. $4k monthly fully loaded) but you also never have things delayed by vacations or sick days, thus making the entire company more reactive to customer demands.

Would be nice if there was more focus from software tech on making more opportunities for people rather than the trend of eliminating more humans from the workforce.

Allowing companies to do more work and hire more people in their field of expertise (be it a bakery or a PCB factory) is better than having them hire low-paid employees to operate the fax and fill multiple forms by hand.

Since we're talking Germany, the main complaint here is that there's not enough people available to work. "Well just bring in immigrants", you might say, but funny enough the lack of people in the immigration service is always cited as a bottleneck... and this bottleneck is mostly because of lack of digitalisation.

My argument is not about the value of what digitalization can provide for a specific company. It is about the value to the average citizen in an economy, who are the people the economy should truly be serving.

The real value is in letting average citizens work in the things they want, highly-paid, highly-satisfying professions, rather than working like computers answering to faxes.

I come from a country that suffered massive premature deindustrialization. My original profession, Electrical Engineering, is jokingly referred as a synonym for "Uber Driver". About 80% of my classmates aren't working as Engineers anymore. The rest left the country. I did both. Nobody is happy about it.

Here's another: the people doing those bureaucratic things by hand also hate it. It's not a choice. It's just something they're stuck with.

Since you talked about consolidation, there is much more consolidation going on when a consumer chooses to go with industrial products rather than the local bakery due to communication difficulties. Or with China PCBs instead of a local PCB producer.

However, what is the better option here?

A. I digitise their primitive tasks like paper forms and a few low-paid employees get fired but the company overall remains competitive and most employees retain their jobs.

B. They get crushed by foreign competition because they are too slow and too inflexible to justify the higher prices. The company goes belly up and everyone loses their job. And/or parts of the company get outsourced to China to reduce costs.

My conclusion is that sacrificing a few office workers to keep the technology research and manufacturing in the west is, yes, cruel, but still better than the alternative.

Funny enough I actually was assisting with doing just this for a western US state when they adopted Obamacare. We used Activebatch to process incoming applications. It was such a great "drag and drop" workflow with additional provisions for handling failed steps, handling cases where the server doing the works starts to fall out of normal parameters (gets overloaded or some resource goes missing) and so much more.

Despite all this and us over-provisioning the servers, the avalanche of applications coming in were so much that we totally managed to overload our servers anyway and had to rush to add so much more capacity.

I wish there was something as easy to use as Activebatch available as an open source option. It is such a hidden gem that is hidden away because the company that sells it are idiots that wall it behind "enterprise sales". The best I can find is Apache Airflow but it does not stand a candle to Activebatch for ease of use.

God there is SO MUCH I want to automate in the world but the biggest hurdle that stands in the way is that actually manually coding all this crap is a massive hurdle and that drag and drop with intelligence and the ability to customize when running workloads is a much better option.

On the other hand, I’m more than willing to accept my 35% lower compensation to have a full time job than I know I could make if I went independent.

So 1.5x would be a steal in comparison.

Pure employee costs are more in the 1.2 - 1.3x range (Europe). That is 30% on top of the gross salary for employer taxes, health insurances etc.

To start: everyone pays 34.75% of mandatory social contribution, even if you are on minimum wage. Government tricks people saying the contribution is "only" 11% but charges the other 23.75% from the employer.

So if a company pays 1000 eur to "you" (remember a chunk goes straight to government and skips you, but they are still spending that to pay you) you get 652.5 euro. Or 65% roughly. And that is only the social contribution part.

The average income tax for a tech worker is around 20%. Thus you get instead 500 euro flat.

Thus a Portuguese company to hire a tech worker would literally spend the double of your taxless wages just to hire you and pay the income taxes and social contribution. Then if you factor all other potential expenses things get even sillier.

some enterprising manager realizes this, makes up a new job title (that sound important) to justify the 4x salary, and thus lead to job title inflation as other people sees such a title earning high.

It's also easier to book a high fixed cost than a high ongoing cost.

Having a ssalary cap on certain positions, but paying top dollar for external consultants doing the same is very very common.

As an external consultant you are - to some extent - outside the hierarchy, so the usual rules don't apply.

When companies get really big and dysunctional they start to treat their customers as if they're the bottom of the hierarchy. Which is how you get all finds of corporate outrages.

That is, if the company hires you, they hire you (in theory) forever. But if they contract with you, that's usually for the duration of the contract - a few months. A higher rate but for a short time is easier to justify than a slightly lower, but still high, rate forever.

Because of lack of benefits, don't have to go through unions to fire ect.

Same reason you pay higher on a short term apartmentlease.

On last few teams I have been pulling most of the project while being unpaid (southern Europe devs rejoice) so I m thinking about incorporating as well, but with kid on the way I am worried I won't be able to find clients...

Not getting paid? Are you trying to break into an industry with an unpaid internship or is this a hack-a-thon side project?

I don't understand how structuring an independent contractor offering will get you paid by the same folks who aren't paying you at the moment.

Doesn't sound like it would solve your issue.

This is interesting because it was my experience in school as well. In most group projects, 1 or 2 people would carry the rest of the group.

> Price’s law says that 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

Here's a law for you; anybody who's using forms like "<Name>'s law" is a moron

Americans?

“Derek Price, who was a British physicist [...]”

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

> Jordan Bernt Peterson (born 12 June 1962) is a Canadian psychologist, author, and media commentator.

I’m sure if the lecturers cared they could have managed it properly but they didn’t I don’t know of any who did.

You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff.

This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them.

The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardless of self-interest or agenda. They will do both prestigious work, and will also do thankless work, as long as it contributes to the success of the project. They will stay late, fix up other's mistakes, etc, without complaints or expectation that others do the same.

This is the type i admire and want to work with.

Been there, done that, it's a career dead-end.

But that doesn't match the real world. In the real world managers dig into that all the time. They develop understandings of the performance of individual team members. If they don't, we call that a pathology and it's their fault because they have all the tools and time they need to do it. Certainly many fail at that and there are plenty of complaints about that in this discussion, but it isn't inevitable the way it is for a school grader.

I see no way to resolve this gap, and as a result, my recommendation, for all the zero good it will do, is that schools need to just accept they can't really simulate a group project and stop assigning them.

For those stuck in them in school, I have no particular advice. I'm not sure what I would do myself if I were placed in such a scenario again. Probably just grumble and be the guy doing the project again.

But for those in a work situation, you have a reasonably good chance of having an option you may not realize: Document, document, document! Document that your current task is blocked on $SLACKER's work. Document that you added unit tests to $SLACKER's work around your needs and they failed and you sent it back. Document that they broke the unit tests to make them pass and it still doesn't meet your needs. Document, document, document.

There's two reasons for this: One, it covers your own bum. You will find that even if at first you may be pushed into being a "team player" there does generally come a point where SLACKER needs to contribute something meaningful themselves to be of any value. Second, to get an employee fired nowadays, you need a solid documentation trail. If your manager does not or can not make one, well, they don't really have to. You can go a long ways towards providing HR with one yourself.

I don't guarantee that will work in every situation, but I would suggest that you not let your cynicism block you from at least trying here. And to be honest, if that just completely doesn't work and you are in a situation where HR is just perfectly OK with a paper trail of documented lack of performance over a period of time, well, maybe that's a signal it's time to leave. Even a cynic can see that paper makes the world go round and you can often turn that to your own advantage with just a bit of effort.

Regarding improving group projects in schools: This is not a good idea, but a thought: school groups have rotating “managers” that are made to mainly coordinate and communicate with the professor. This mirrors the dynamic in industry, but I can see it becoming a nightmare, far worse than the current paradigm.

Also, documentation is a great idea, and I think pull requests are useful way to track this and improve the situation - by taking action to fix a problem and create an artifact of the action (with comments on the why).

(the $SLACKER env var is a nice touch. The goal is to have never get defined, but alas.)

What's worse is that your metric is as likely to be out of sync as code comments. If you're lucky you can notice that a) a new "10x" is actually adding value in a way you never thought to measure, and b) you already spent that 10x money on the employees whose "10x" is hacking your metrics as targets. More likely, you just notice "a" and not "b."

I think the outrage over this goes all the way back to the Greeks. IIRC Plato had a Socratic dialogue about the politician generally beating the expert in debate because the politician is an expert in persuasion. "Being an engineer" isn't a solution because, as you imply, at some point the engineer has to pay the bills. And it's at that point they are out of their element and subject to the politician who specializes in persuading engineers to do things.

If I were wrong, engineers would have long used a web-of-trust to publicly post their salaries (or perhaps anonymized statistics derived from them) to ensure companies aren't taking advantage of anyone at scale.

Edit: clarification

But when a system does bother with individual differences in contribution, inequality is seen as necessarily unjust. I don’t see how you can live through a group project and believe that. Some people contributing much more than others or being much more competent than others is eminently plausible! That’s how most things go!

If your corporation is not compensating you enough to deal with the additional headache of politics, I'd try working for a smaller company.

I work in the public service where accountability has been transformed from a concrete thing (who is responsible for this?) to a 'value'. So the org chart is set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, the processes are set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, but if you point this out managers will retort that it doesn't matter, because what's really important is that everyone personally commits to the value of accountability which in turn will create a culture of accountability. They've replaced performance reviews with workers writing about how much they embrace accountability (of course the absence of genuine reviews helps ensure no-one can be held accountable for poor performance).

I'm increasingly of the opinion that any manager who talks at length about culture is a moron. It's a fuzzy catch-all that can be invoked to explain anything without understanding anything, of great value to the modern manager who typically understands nothing.

I've seem this a lot in companies adopting agile. That was always a cabal that had all the real power and the benefits than come with it, but suddenly because of "self-organizing", "flat hierarchy", there was no more any more or less formal path for ascending in the organization.

During the first years of the scrum frenzy, the figure of the tech lead almost disappeared in a lot of companies.

In my "big tech company", there's a thorough (and I think overall fair) evaluation process, and a very high performer can earn a significant amount of money, e.g. 10x the salary of a junior. People are also strongly incentized to deliver through bonuses and stock refresher.

I'm not denying that what you describe exists in some (most?) companies, but there are tons of companies out there, and it's also up to employees to do their homework and find places that suits their values and ambitions. They do exist!

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en... [2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-...

The real challenge is how can organisations best leverage super stars to achieve great things. It's difficult because managers have to be smart and confident, and the super star can't be allowed to undermine others.

The high prevalence of insecure managers and arrogant super stars makes this hard to do.

Idea is that they will outlive any human life or it would be possible to detach from any single person.

There is of course cost attached of not being fully efficient, but that is irrelevant in bigger scale.

That you need to hire 29 instances of the worst and least talented garbage to push just one lonely little sad superman?

Take any company, and grade it (personally!) on both "how ideologically driven is their mission" and "how productive are they"; eight times out of ten it'll correlate. New companies like OpenAI ("we're inventing machine intelligence"; strong ideology/mission); extremely productive. Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, extremely strong, important mission, extremely productive. Some smaller companies like 37Signals, very ideologically/personality driven, very productive. There's even a few big tech companies left, like Cloudflare, that have strong, coherent mission drive ("Building A Better Internet") and have productivity to match it.

One counter-example (and why its, like, eight out of ten): Microsoft. No one has any clue what Microsoft's mission is. That product factory still churns out more new stuff than anyone on the west coast.

Those two paragraphs are 100% connected, because roughly the only way to mitigate (not eliminate) the risk of superstars leaving is high, coherent mission drive. "High" means "its clear, its communicated, its meaningful" and "coherent" means "its practiced, its demonstrated, its genuine". Compensation is another way, but the problems with compensation are (1) you will lose the compensation fight with competitors eventually, (2) it selects for actors that aren't interested in anything except compensation, and (3) it breeds complacency/retirement without simultaneous high+coherent mission drive (Nvidia's problem right now).

Oxide [1] is an interesting case-study in mitigating some negative impacts of high compensation; "Everyone at Oxide makes $201,227 USD, regardless of location."

It just comes down to: Poor Leadership. If the product is boring, if leadership can't coherently communicate mission, direction, value, etc; superstars aren't going to join or stay for very long. Everything else is window dressing. In the absence of that, the most effective way to maintain continuity of operations is normalization and "the bell curve".

Also: If you find yourself believing "well, some companies just don't operate in an area where high mission drive is even possible, not every company is on the bleeding edge of AI CryptoTech", just stop. I don't care what you're doing; building a high, coherent mission is always possible. Amazon's mission is to be the most customer-centric company on the planet. That's a freakin awesome mission that would resonate with a ton of superstars, and its a mission that every damn company could have, if their leadership chooses it and is high quality enough to live it.

[1] https://oxide.computer/careers

I must say that I have heard that "hit by a bus" argument once too many.

What I see:

1 People very rarely get hit by a bus.

2 When someone leaves, two things happen.

A) Someone else, very often previously anonymous, becomes the new rock star.

B) It turns out that super important thing that guy was expert on was not so important after all...

You never know the type of employee and their motives for leaving until they do. Some are excellent and spend two weeks documenting and knowledge sharing. Some take a two week vacation. This point is orthogonal to superstar.

And I am speaking from my experience and yours is different.

Just that I have felt lately that the "hit by a bus" card has been played too often close to me and it makes progress slow down.

And I feel that when it does happen, organizations are much more resilient than the worst case that is often painted.

(Changing subject) I am actually pretty intrigued by case 2A in my post, I have seen this often and sometimes it has been me.

What causes someone to step up and more importantly what prevents them from doing so before? Because it means that many orgnanizations have this as an untapped resource.

What should they do to release that resource earlier?

E.g. How much active knowledge sharing on the superstar's domain of expertise, and even process, is happening? A luncheon once a month? Its not enough. How much time is the superstar allowed to spend documenting? Is the rest of the team actually reading it? Is active mentorship happening on the team?

Versus: Create a top-down process, make everyone follow the process, invent hypotheticals as to why the process matters, product factory, etc.

Documentation is good but sometimes i feel like there is a need for something more.

Maybe the previous guy needs to move out of the way. Maybe his way of doing code reviews is discouraging - how important is it really to do everything like it was wired in his brain? Or just let go of the idea of how the code is structured?

I take mentoring seriously since this is my way of adding force multiplication without having to become a manager.

Wow. What market/geographic location are you in?

Realistically, they would be very uncommon, and odds are that your small company has 0 of them. Of the developers I know that are actual superstars when compared to average developers, they have zero problem displaying their value and make upwards of 7 figures. All of them are aged 40+ too.

So, yeah, I don't have a problem with the concept. I just think it gets misapplied.

Who labelled them? The self-labelled are often crappy.

The last superstar I worked with seemed like a Cro-Magnon developer. He used outdated tech, didn't understand many modern dev techniques. However he was extremely productive (he was very very good at concentrating on necessary outcomes and ignoring make work). His value was _far_ more than 10x the average developer. He certainly didn't seem to be valuable. Despite his serious faults he produced gold. He was wildly undervalued by other developers.

Keep your eyes open - some superstars are invisible. This especially holds in other soft areas like marketing.

That’s who I imagined.

I can't imagine you can sustain the technical excellence over decades in places like Nvidia, Apple, Nintendo, ... without having a very robust process of protecting high-performance deeply technical people from wider organisational politics.

In a supermarket chain you need 1000 people following the exact process developed by a small team of superstars at head office.

Sometimes you will get someone who is good at convincing the others to stay on process, they get to be managers. IE the smarter staff rise up.

This is quite different to your example. Perhaps the corporation is not so stupid, its just not good at writing software?

No Messi, Ronaldo or Mbappé can win a Championship or the Champions League on their own. Nor can Brady win the Super Bowl without a team. Every rockstar has a team of song writers (there are exceptions to that so), producers, marketing and tour people behind them.

A "rockstar" that is unable to follow rules or work in a team is nothing but a loose cannon.

Caveat is so, you can be a great fit in team / corporation A and a terrible one in team / corporation B. And what people like Sinsek have to say about all of this, is horse crap.

I'm pretty sure you can run whatever analytics you'd like and they'd all say that (prime) Brady is more than worth 100x the salary of the JAG qb3 on the practice squad.

The skill curve for athletic and knowledge work is steep and tall. Measuring it outside of games is the hard part.

- Brady at his prime in a team of highschool amateurs

- the back-up team of, I have no real idea about american football so feel free to pick a better example, the Cowboys

What do you think?

To your question: You can always saddle a 'rockstar' with enough negative-value players to result in poor overall performance. You've contriving an irrelevant situation -- also one where you've put 53 rockstars,[1] against a bunch of highschoolers plus one rockstar. Just about every player on the Dallas cowboys, except maybe the kicker/punter would drag an average highschool to the state championship.

[0]And we all know how that has turned out over the last 20 odd years.

[1]Rockstar-ship is situational/relative - the backup RB on the cowboys is a scrub in the NFL. He would also be the best highdchool player in the country by a large margin (aka a rockstar).

Some problems are innovation and misaligned incentives. A highly optimized system is efficient but inflexible, and sometimes optimized towards the wrong targets.

I observed something like this, or at least I thought I did. With many more years of reflection, and there were hints along the way as it happened in realtime, I came to realize that the contribution of those I had written off as non-performers and dead weight was actually higher than I had estimated and difficult to actually quantify. My hope for you is that you one day reach similar epiphanies. Because your attitude that some are much better than others and need to be compensated out of proportion is quite toxic. Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.

Second, I think if you genuinely have a complaint about dead weight it's probably better to hire selectively, cautiously and consciously rather than evaluate staff as sub-par after that point. Yes that's difficult to do especially with the first point, and it won't be perfect either.

Specifically about this:

> Even harmful to those you have estimated as "top performers" should they make the kind of kind of money you think they deserve. It is a false estimation of their ability and contribution, and there is seldom worse than confidently false judgements that exclude some people and favor others. Harmful to all parties involved.

It's whoever makes the coffee. Because without the coffee, a whole lot less work gets done.

Don't forget whoever replaces the toilet paper rolls in the bathroom, either.

"Processes" are for factories. Diluting is good for factories, cogs.

For some type of 'creationary' work, it's also fine.

For me a "superstar" is a friendly capable coder, who simplifies, teaches and learns in a feedback loop. They are indeed very rare.

1: https://www.levels.fyi/2023/?level=Principal%20Engineer

I have often wondered about this myself, and believe there's some nuance to acknowledge:

- Yes, it is absolutely the case that individuals often carry teams. It does sometimes feel like they're subsidizing others' salaries.

- There's an old adage in advertising that goes: we know 50% of our budget is wasted on ineffective ads, we just don't know which 50%. The same probably holds true for organizations allocating wages.

- People go through different phases of their lives, where they can devote more or less energy to work. This fact may lend credence to a compensation structure that's based on bonuses and equity versus salary. Flat salary bands seem to discourage meritocracy without this adjustment.

- Organizations themselves are also dynamic. Consider a small org seeded by a prolific worker. They make the org successful, so the org grows and necessarily dilutes the talent (i.e. reversion to the mean).

- Does an organization have an incentive to "slow down" it's most prolific workers so everyone else can keep up? Conversely, should they develop a culture that speeds everyone else up?

- Should / do prolific workers self-select into higher-performance organizations, e.g. after getting fed up being a big fish in a small pond?

- Team dynamics are undeniable; consider two prolific workers with different styles clashing.

I personally would love to work on a team of superstars who mesh, and can capture disproportionate value relative to large, slow, mediocre orgs. The hard part is finding one and keeping it together.