TL;DR: -Top employees use top large corporations as springboards to their careers rather than as 30-year destinations, a marked change from the past.
-Top large corporations reward interpersonal skills and getting along more than brilliance, causing top employees to seek employment elsewhere.
-The advent of the internet has heightened the communication gap between the generations, making it hard for "partners" and "new associates" to communicate.
The author didn't provide evidence for much of what she claimed, and did not build towards a conclusion. More, the above themes did not seem like new news to me. Also, the first two themes did not clearly related to the third. The article felt like meandering observations -- which is fine insofar as it goes, but, while I enjoyed the read, I wanted more to conclude it. Maybe I'll find that here in the comments?
Your first point pretty much explains everything, because it is an effect, not a cause.
The reason why top employees don't treat large corporations as 30-year destinations is because it is clear they will downsize us at the drop of a quarterly revenue. It isn't "brilliant" employees who recognize this, but all employees, and workers have quite reasonably responded by withholding all loyalty from their employer and behaving as if they are autonomous agents in a free market, which in fact they are.
This works out well for people in tech who are even moderately competent because it gives us mobility, but pretty badly for everyone else. However, just as corporate management took the lead in losing money by treating long-term, highly knowledgeable, high-skill employees as disposable parts, they are going to have to take the lead by realizing that employee turnover is enormously expensive and it's only going to get worse as new generations enter the workforce with the express intent of exploiting their employers for all they're worth.
It would, after all, be positively immoral for a worker to do anything else in the modern corporate environment.
>It would, after all, be positively immoral for a worker to do anything else in the modern corporate environment.
This really struck a chord with me, with the rhetoric of the last few decades that it is a company's (and management/board) moral obligation to shareholders to do everything in their power that is not expressly against the word of the law to maximize their profits.
In a similar vein, a worker is morally obligated to his or her "shareholders" (him/herself, family, etc.) to maximize his or her financial (or other, personal) gain.
I learned quickly in a layoff how little a company actually cares about you - Sure they threw us a small severance package (attached to a nice "you won't do anything to harm the company's reputation" clause), but at the end of the day, you owe them nothing and they owe you nothing other than an exchange of services. Employment is so transactional nowadays.
Without pensions, there is not really a point in staying in one place too long anymore. Studies show that it's pretty common after two years in the same place you'll end up effectively losing money.
> just as corporate management took the lead in losing money by treating long-term, highly knowledgeable, high-skill employees as disposable parts, they are going to have to take the lead by realizing that employee turnover is enormously expensive
Maximize your short-term gains, but then you lose long-term - what a "big surprise".
I don't see how this will self-correct. Corporations are genetically predisposed to think short-term, and the tendency is only getting worse in the new reality.
I've seen this phenomenon myself, though I have no hard data either.
Personally I think a big reason is that the promotion is dead. There's a palpable sense in every large organization I've worked for is that working hard simply won't get you rewarded and that there's a hard glass ceiling on your ability to rise through merit.
I've found this to be true when I look at my own earnings as well. I have never experienced a significant jump in earnings or responsibility except by switching jobs. Never. I've worked very hard in some jobs, but I have never been rewarded for it except through an ability to cite my present work as a springboard to somewhere else.
That seems to be the case for most people I know, switching jobs is the new promotion. I've had minor raises, entirely remittance, but the few major pay increases and job title changes always have been entirely attributed from leaving an organization for another.
I found it surprising when I worked for a company (more than number years ago) that was primarily a retailer preferred to hire externally for new store managers instead of hiring from its pool of mostly college educated sales staff.
I've seen it before, but they were usually catalyzed by an "unexpected" situation, like 2/3 of the core software team leaving in exodus, and management scrambling to golden handcuff the remaining key engineers, or when 1 of the 2 engineering leads left after 4 years of service, and management again moved to lock up the other remaining one.
I currently work at a company where this isn't the case, and I have experienced a significant jump in earnings and responsibility, and it's refreshing, but it's sort of the exception that proves the rule. Internal mobility and hiring/promoting from within is an explicit tenet of the company culture. I think if you don't explicitly set it up that way, a company will default to the dysfunctional situation you describe.
I think she's missed the obvious. Employers want the McDonald's system, where the brilliance is in the system, not the employees. If it's in the worker, it's perishable; in the system, it's not. When I hire a machine operator, brilliance isn't a useful asset, so I'm not paying for it. Some brains, yes, sure, but not above a 120 IQ. That's all the job requires, and I keep it structured that way.
It's easy enough to understand this applied to fast food, but I get the impression other industries would rather not believe it to be true.
Thing is, I think it's clearly evidenced in tech by every "I went through two days of interviewing on algorithms and distributed systems to hack on PHP boilerplate?" story. Tech might go to the trouble to select for brilliance, but they aren't necessarily using or paying for it.
Further it's readily admitted by folks like a16z [1].
"Thus software itself becomes the driving force of leveling the ability to write software to solve problems. This is a good thing: As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people."
Employees also want predictability where the pay comes from the system and not from your direct boss. Bosses are perishable and the system is not.
Anyone who choose to take a job accepts this.
Real brilliance - creativity - requires you to embrace the unpredictable. That section of society are the inventors, who are willing to face long odds and do what they want.
The system works only for its survival. It is not interested in giving you a wholesome life.
Is this really the assumption you operate with? I'm not trying to sound condescending because this is pretty much what I observed at a certain major tech company. The whole thing wasn't very far from a giant meat factory and it was exactly why there hadn't been any innovation in decades.
You can argue that if your business model is so good that you don't need to innovate to stay in business then by all means milk it for what it's worth but that doesn't feel like a long-term strategy. Microsoft and friends have R&D departments that rival the best research institutions in the world and they pay a premium for it. If some of that was a natural byproduct of their core business operations then maybe they wouldn't need to pay a premium for it.
For a sufficiently large business, it's important to be stable/robust -- that is, to be able to withstand change. A business that's heavily reliant on individual brilliance across the board has the disadvantage of potentially collapsing if enough brilliant people leave without training equally brilliant replacements.
Yes, you want some brilliant people specifically in R&D / innovation. You want brilliant people overseeing the entire system. Brilliant people in key positions might improve your overall efficiency by an order of magnitude on a particular project -- but you don't want the whole project to fall apart just because Joe moved out of state or Jane went on long-term maternity leave or Jake was hit by a bus.
Microsoft does have a world-class R&D department, but they also have a lot of average code monkeys and average janitors and average HR people.
Yes that sounds very logical. In the end this is probably true for every job on every level. For example, as a programmer it's good to have a high IQ, but if it's too high you might not fit in the company anymore.
> Years of drudgery and late nights in the office have a way of taking the shine off any brilliance, and, in any case, there is no incentive to hang on to it as the corporate world doesn't rate it.
> Rather than reward brilliance, it prefers skills that graduates can't see - good judgment, a nice way with clients, and an instinct for when to bite your lip.
This is a curiously cynical perspective. "Brilliance" alone doesn't necessarily create value or pay the bills. The combination of high IQ and low EQ can be harmful to customer relationships and co-workers. The corporate world values soft skills just as much if not more than raw intelligence because soft skills can often make or break a business.
Notwithstanding the fact that a lot of young employees overestimate just how clever they are and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that smart ideas won't always be viable in the real world, instead of pretending that "brilliance" is some sort of panacea that companies should cling to regardless of the cost, the author should consider that pragmatic, well-rounded employees who can perform consistently might be better contributors than the brilliant, intense employees who become disillusioned whenever they don't get their way.
> The combination of high IQ and low EQ can be harmful to customer relationships and co-workers.
Citation?
The last I read about it[1], it turned out that EQ is vastly overrated, accounting for only 1% of overall job performance, whereas IQ accounted for 14%. That's more than an order of magnitude.
That EQ takes primacy over IQ is pretty well-established in the consulting industry. In fact, this is emphasized on day one for new hires. And you move into more client-facing roles in large companies, this becomes even more important.
Of course, you need the raw cognitive power to solve problems. But at the high-end of consulting, clients already assume this to be this case (otherwise they wouldn't be spending $200+/hour for people fresh out of college). What clients are looking for is more akin to a 'trusted advisor'[1]. Someone they can trust and rely on.
Yes, you can be socially awkward and still get the job done. But you probably won't be considered when the next opportunity arises; what people value are relationships. If you've got that (and you have the technical chops), clients will tend to keep calling you back for years to come. Or perhaps mention you to their peers.
For anyone considering working independently, I highly recommend David Maister's books. He writes clearly on earning trust, the art of listening, providing advice, establishing relationships, and so on.
This is really what separates the engineers who can command top dollar for their skills in the marketplace--versus those who are viewed as just another number on a spreadsheet to minimize (in the eyes of management at most large companies).
If you read carefully, one reason cognitive ability is more valuable than EQ is that people with great cognitive ability can quickly learn to simulate high EQ when they need to. So EQ actually does matter, but can be simulated with general intelligence.
Anyway, I don't think the parent was talking about actual "EQ," which is a term of art that has a specific definition and measurement tools (as refenced in that article).
I think he was just saying the people who believe they are much more brilliant than all their coworkers can be hard to work with, which can cause harm to a large organization.
Without knowing how those studies were performed or analysed we can't really put those numbers in their proper context.
"EI positively predicts performance for high emotional labor jobs and negatively predicts performance for low emotional labor jobs" (from the paper linked in the article you cite).
Sounds exactly like something a fresh college grad would say. All brilliant people jump from company to company, all people who stay at one company are dull.
I say, if you're enjoying yourself at one company, learning a lot, and moving up, why not keep it up?
Not to mention once you have a family / kids, me thinks you are much less likely to jump.
"The main thing that had struck him so far was that people seemed to get dimmer the higher they went in the organisation. I asked if he had any explanation for this and he said it was self-selection.
Really smart people don't stay at the institutions they have fought so hard to get into. The best leave within two or three years - the slightly less good stay a bit longer, and only the also-rans and the terminally unimaginative are in for the long haul."
Also, I used to work in consulting firm, so by this definition, all of the partners are also-rans and terminally unimaginative - I'd say some partners fit this definition, but many others were bright-eyed, bushy tailed, and full of interesting ideas / perspectives.
Working in such an organisation and being in the middle ranks (Manager), I may have a reconciling view to offer. These huge organisations (I see partners mentioned so I will assume big4) are not pioneering innovators (even if they try to appear so) but powerhouses of mediocrity. You can be brilliant and it will be appreciated to some degree, but most probably the passion that comes with your brilliance will be subdued by the layers of mediocrity between you and the mediocre leadership.
In partnerships, this is even more accentuated by the fact that there is division of power by design, so even if a visionary leader appreciates a vision you still have to convince the partnership which is mostly a matter of PR rather than quality of idea. I can relate to the graduate, but the fact is a brilliant graduate will be too anxious to demonstrate their skills which does not help them see the reality. It is not a matter of personal skills, there are brilliant people sprinkled in the organisation at different levels, but a matter of organisational culture that builds on commoditising ideas.
In a big organisation the skills are averaged out and it is the greatest common divisor that can be commoditised. There are more brilliant partners than graduates but the aggregated soup is tasteless. And by the time you are a partner you make enough money to not care about the spice you add to the soup but about the measured KPIs that make up your contribution (sales.)
It reads more like a rant, but I am glad to give more details on specifics. Just to address the title, it is not that firms don't want you to be brilliant at your job, it is that they could not care less unless it is a client that focuses on your brilliance. And the situation with clients is very similar but I will not address it here.
That is not only true for tech companies like that but also for instance for top tier investment banks and consulting firms. They hire only the best and brightest and then relegate them to juggling spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations. It seems to be more about being able to say that your people are the best and brightest (and charging appropriately) than about actually leveraging their skills.
In mgmt consulting at least, being bright is actually important because it is immensely important to be able to put on a guise of competence and mastery to your client even when you have no idea wtf is going on. "Looking and sounding the part" is one of the selection factors.
My friend once told me that the most important skill he picked up at one of the big 3 firms is to appear utterly confident in his ideas and proposals when in reality, he had no idea what he was talking about. (then again, these guys will then turn it around and actually learn a crap ton about the industry in the following 2 days by pouring over research)
> to appear utterly confident in his ideas and proposals
I'm sure this clip has probably crossed your screen before, but I think that protagonist eventually realizes he has to out-BS the BS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Ehh. Maybe, but I doubt it. It seems like they are just people that were born lucky (mostly) and followed every single little rule ever. Yeah, they worked hard, no doubt, but to say that they are the best and brightest isn't true. If they were, we'd see a lot more Nobels and such out of them.
Brilliant is a very bold word -- I've met a number of people who work (or who have previously worked) at Google and Facebook that are a long way from brilliant.
But the point is valid in that we have an industry where every company likes to posture and interview as if they are hiring the top 1% of programmers only to turn around and give them jobs that a well-trained monkey could almost do.
Well, in this industry at least, every great engineer you do manage to hire is one fewer great engineer that your competitor can't hire. In an environment of talent scarcity, resource hoarding actually seems like a perfectly reasonable strategy.
Certainly with caveats... I know a number of smart people who work there, but they primarily want a 'safe' thing for the resume and finances, and take their San Francisco lifestyle a little more seriously than their work-based challenges (if they are considered challenges). That's only a few data points granted.
Is it possible that this you've gathered this impression because you're interacting with them in the context of their San Francisco lifestyle, rather than the context of their professional workplace?
Companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and (yes, even still) Microsoft are wonderful door openers, sort of like ivy league colleges. You may have learned nothing more than someone who worked at a local CRUD shop, but just having been through the vetting process of a highly-recognizable tech company gives you two legs up when you are interviewing at other places later.
Facebook pays well, has good benefits, is relatively stable (very stable compared to an early stage startup), offers an opportunity to work on a much larger scale than almost any startup, and is (mostly) populated with a group of very smart people. I'm puzzled by why wanting to get into that situation would seem odd.
Well, at risk of trying to read the mind of your parent poster, I suspect it seems odd because that person thinks that working at Facebook is unlikely to (for a junior employee) involve stimulating work, interact meaningfully with Facebook's scale, or build skills necessary for more senior-level work later in one's career. And be frustrating on an organizational level and involve working at a kind of douchey company.
And right now, I think there's at least a perception that the instability of smaller companies is compensated for by a very strong job market, that you can find very smart people in lots of places, and that most of the non-monetary benefits are unlikely to be really worthwhile at least for young healthy people. Leaving basically pay as the differentiating factor.
I don't whole-heartedly endorse the above analysis, but I think it has large elements of truth in it. If my hypothetical 22 year old niece told me she had job offers from Facebook and also from a small start-up, I suspect I'd advise her to take the Facebook job and quit 1-2 years later. But I'm not sure my advice would be correct.
> I suspect I'd advise her to take the Facebook job and quit 1-2 years later. But I'm not sure my advice would be correct.
No idea about the short term stay as they always have interesting challenges, but, yes, Facebook is a household name; everybody's used it. It counts for quite a bit in the self-marketing department, even if you _are_ just doing entry level work.
They pay well and if you leave the HN/Reddit bubble, there are CS students out there (that are pretty smart) that really would LOVE to have jobs at Microsoft/Facebook/Yahoo/ (insert any company unpopular on HN here).
Graduating CS student here, Google is my dream job. I would also be exceedingly happy to work at any of the following: Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Amazon, Intel, etc.
Starting my own startup sounds cool and all but it would be too much work for me and I just because I don't agree 100% with a companies policies doesn't make them an undesirable workplace.
Mainly the prestige but all four of those are good points. There aren't many places where you have an opportunity to do things for the sake of doing them, most places either don't value technology or don't have to budget to investigate new and interesting technology. I love the place I currently work and love the people I work with, however I don't want to be doing line of business crud apps forever. If I could get a good wage in academia I would but it seems much less likely than getting a job at one of those companies I listed.
From my outsider perspective, I don't even keep track of these things much:
* Amazon seems to have a reputation for burning employees out.
* IBM seems quite stagnant. They're basically a huge consulting/services company, not very interesting.
* No one really thinks Microsoft can innovate anymore. They're pretty much coasting on Windows and Office, and that's been eroding for a long time. They don't seem to be able to execute anything successfully. Do you know anyone with a Windows phone? Remember the Zune? Do you search with Bing? What are they doing? Desperately trying to do anything to stay relevant, and failing badly. They're on the IBM lifecycle path, but they're not yet just a large services/consulting company. They're still trying to build products, and they just suck. What are your associations with Microsoft right now? When I think of Apple, I think of the iphone/ipod/itunes. When I think of Microsoft, I think of the Windows 8 interface.
One fellow student of mine wanted to work at microsoft so she could develop the next (I forget exactly) which was never developed at MS, they just bought a little startup, slapped the MS name and logo on it, marked the price way up, and went into maint mode (which is really boring).
She genuinely thought they innovate internally rather than thru purchasing startups (aka outsourced R+D)
Some people specifically want to do maint mode work, but she very specifically wanted to develop "new products" like an example I know was merely a turnkey purchased startup.
You make it sound like Facebook is a 10 man operation where everyone gets to make decisions and have an impact on the outcome of company initiatives. Trust me that's not what it looks like when you're on the ground floor.
For the people building the customer accessible stuff, yes. But they also have a need for things that aren't at the point where saving cycles will make a difference.
They build some amazing technology. I don't think I could get over my issues with Facebook enough to work there, but part of me desperately wants to work on Hack and HHVM with them (thank the flying spaghetti monster for open source software!).
It's all open source. Here's HHVM: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm. What's stopping you from working on it now? For all intents and purposes you would be hacking on it with them.
I am, hence my parenthetical. Currently on the application/tools side, building some infrastructure and pushing the language to find it's rough edges, but I've been learning OCaml to be able to get stuck into the code directly.
On the other hand, there's something to be said for working directly with the main developers in a room with them!
The article raises a good point about the 'diagonal' transfer technique. Horizontal would be moving about in your own pay grade to a different job, vertical would be up or down in pay in your own company. Diagonal is very much something that occurs with frequency. You company may not have a position for you to move up into but another fir does, so you jump up and over. Job hopping is not that bad and I really dont see a stigma anymore as people just plain are not retiring and companies are so fragile as is.
Every quarter I'd think. If you can't stick around for the quarterly numbers to pop through and then get punishment or reward, then you'd be a job hopper. If/when we change to a sub quarterly financial system, then the job hopper meme would adjust to that as well.
This is an interesting point, but I think the source (the graduate now working at one of the "most prestigious employers in the world") may be affected by a healthy dose of the Dunning-Kruger effect[1].
First of all, as a 22-year-old it's easy to feel like 2-3 years is an eternity. It's also easy to undervalue the attributes that the more senior employees possess, as one simply can't see them.
"Brilliant" and "Best" are not necessary synonyms. The first seems to me to mean standing out from the crowd, thinking differently, challenging the status quo.
Those are valuable, possibly even essential traits. However, one can easily waste a lot of energy spinning wheels trying to do those things at the wrong times -- a mistake I am very personally familiar with.
My sense is this graduate will spend a few years disrupting things a bit with mixed success. In 5-8 years, if they are as bright as they think they are, they'll have a lot of insight on new skills that they weren't even aware of at play in their seniors' interactions. I hope also that the graduate retains most of their original brilliance, so that they can begin to make a serious difference with a matured, balanced perspective on what their peers and seniors have to offer.
Lucy Kellaway writes a humorous column for the FT, the main subject of which is management nonsense.
The twist of this piece is that a new graduate considers her to be one of the dumb management that she has been mocking since the early 1990s (when I started reading her column), if not before.
I think while this point of view is indeed very true for the large majority, larger companies combat this job hopping, by encouraging internal job switching; ie. going from one area of business to another, which is closer to getting a new job, than getting a promotion. This ensures that the company doesn't waste time in getting a ext. employee to get accustomed to the culture. But that's really the essence Human Capital Management (HCM).
I am however not so sure, how widespread this practice is, maybe you guys know?
I think this is too SV-centric (or even tech-centric). For instance, the major oil companies still offer pensions (and 401k's) and many employees stick around for decades. They also higher senior management internally. Marissa Mayer figures are relatively rare in the industry.
I work for a company that promotes on average every 14 mos with average raise of over 14%. If you're a software developer looking for an unparalleled career path, let me know.
That sounds pretty slow - by job hopping, it can be quite feasible to raise your salary by 200+%, and learn more to boot due to progressively increasing responsibilities. The market for software engineers is quite cutthroat.
-Top large corporations reward interpersonal skills and getting along more than brilliance, causing top employees to seek employment elsewhere.
-The advent of the internet has heightened the communication gap between the generations, making it hard for "partners" and "new associates" to communicate.
The author didn't provide evidence for much of what she claimed, and did not build towards a conclusion. More, the above themes did not seem like new news to me. Also, the first two themes did not clearly related to the third. The article felt like meandering observations -- which is fine insofar as it goes, but, while I enjoyed the read, I wanted more to conclude it. Maybe I'll find that here in the comments?