This story made me think. Until now I had the impression that mediocrity at large corporations is inevitable no matter how many smart people they employ, simply due to the size of the corporation. For every talented, competent employee they have 10 average or below-average employees. Even at Google, even (and especially) at Microsoft. Competent people cannot choose who to work with so whatever extra they do is lost in the mediocrity that surrounds them.
After reading this article I have realized that even at large corporations if you make isolated and largely idependent small teams of highly competent people that can select their members themselves, you can create "startup" bubbles inside the organization that can deliver outstanding results. Maybe this is the way to go when growing large, from a medium-sized enterprise to a large corporation?
It's a mistake to think that corporate mediocrity follows from employee mediocrity. On the contrary, a significant amount of bad software is made to work by the efforts of a large number of rather smart people.
A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline.
These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.
Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.
One problem is when external forces bring in incompetent management. Being part of such a team may be a great experience, but you are always at the mercy of higher ups. Your one real point of leverage is to walk out the door. If the people managing you don't respect what you bring to the table, you lose even this. And if they don't understand it, which is what often happens with "interchangeable" management, they are unlikely to respect it. Then, reflect that there is the potential for this disconnect at each level of management. Start counting the levels that exist in your organization.
If you are smart, you will develop an informal network of contacts/relationships throughout your organization. And keep your resume up to date. (I think that smart people develop such a network not only or even primarily out of a calculated decision to manage their career, but because they find interesting what other people know and do and struggle with and solve, and helping them.)
Perhaps this is one reason social skills (of a certain sort) tend to predominate in large organizations. Given the situation, they become the most essential tools to a career.
Also, regarding social equanimity, a large part of corporate life is "not rocking the boat". At lower ranks, this can imply a strong uniformity of treatment. Your increase will be between 0% and 4%, regardless, because those are the absolute limits that have been chosen. If someone were to receive 10%, there would be a lot of jealousy and unrest. The only way to larger increases is promotion. Promotion changes one's duties. Ergo, certain duties will never be compensated beyond "industry standards". The social structure caps their compensation and so, minus the individual who 'self-sacrifices', their effectiveness.
And this is, in part, where your "average or below-average" coworkers come from. Management won't sweeten the pot, even if, as the posted story implies, going after the top of the talent pool produces far greater returns than the additional investment.
I guess this comment is kind of thrown together. Large social structures tend to enforce norms and drift towards a lowest common denominator. Exceptions occur, but over time, they are fighting the tide.
This had little to do with competence! The team was successful because it grouped together some people who actually enjoyed their job. Individually, they were only slightly better at it than their peers; as a group of "like-minded individuals" (quoted from the article), they spent much more energy collaborating on ways to improve their software testing process.
"Like-minded" is only tangentially related to intelligence or competence or any of the other traits that arrogant people like to ascribe to themselves. It's really about people that have similar priorities and styles and work well together.
If you can sufficiently insulate a group from the corporation in general, sure, you can do better than corporate mediocrity. For a while. But that's harder and harder to do. Particularly for decent stretches of time.
Consider: it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team. They aren't incentivized to ship good software, but to ship on schedule. And should avoidance be impossible, they absolutely will point corporate HR at any and every aspect of that strong team, to break-up, slow-down or demoralize them.
Similarly, with higher-up management. They'll need certain projects to be treated with kid gloves. So they'll scheme and conspire to either defeat the team and ruin its effectiveness or defeat the process, so that the team's effectiveness is rendered moot.
It's the perverted reward structure in large corporations that causes most of their problems. There's no lack of people trying to fix those problems. But any solution (including this one) will ultimately be defeated so long as that reward structure remains.
I think the important part is to allow these groups to be self-selecting. In other words, the smartest people should gravitate towards each other if they are allowed to. For a really interesting take on how to do this take a look at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates#Gore_Cul...
I couldn't find a good source for how many employees they have, but its in the thousands, so they have been able to make this work on a large scale.
They talk about them in (I think) Peopleware. It's part of a segment talking about how fostering a unique culture for your team can increase motivation. They mention that this culture persisted in the Black Team after all its original members had moved on. I'm not sure how long it continued on after that.
Edit: I tried searching for anything related to IBM and their Black Team. It seems Google saturates my search request with everything linking back to this article.
Having worked in similar environments in the early 90's on desktop software, there are some serious downsides to this approach.
Basically, it can lead to having a rift between developers and QA, and in a big corporation, it can become a bureaucratic mess and a 'us' vs. 'them' attitude between groups. I've been in long heated meetings between QA and Dev arguing over individual bugs, not so much on behalf of the customer as opposed to face-saving exercise.
From the article: "And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture." In a perfect world with unlimited time, it's great to find bugs through contortions but usually there is some costs associated with it either with QA not focused on other areas that matter, or having a developer focused on confirming that bug as opposed to working on something else.
Sometimes it's great in a bigger organization to have a unique culture so I agree with the jist of the article and to other HN comments. For instance, I worked at a company on a smaller Macintosh team that fostered a healthy competition with the much bigger Windows team which worked well. I'm just not so sure it works well when people are essentially working on the same project where interfacing with each other is a requirement.
I think a crucial reason this worked is that there was a measurable objective, the value of which was universally understandable. Find software bugs. This is how they measured and selected the initial team, and this is how the team itself could prove its effectiveness in a management-compatible, objective manner and therefore defend its existence. Finding other areas where this could work is an interesting excercise.
I agree that measurability is important, but there are plenty of measurable objectives that don't inspire this sort of espirit de corp exhibitted here. I would love to know more about the leadership of this group, and if the leadership of the group fostered this sort of group identification. Is there a leadership lesson here, or did this emerge organically?
maybe I'm just feeling negative today, but this sounds like some bullshit to me. it sounds like the kind of thing that would be appealing to managers: having "not exceptionally intelligent or talented" employees who become completely obsessed with doing their jobs. great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company. the story and the events themselves are fine, but I feel like the reason this story (and some of these details seem pretty apocryphal to me, like programmers crying because of bug reports) is so popular is that management types are taking the wrong lesson from it: that it would be desirable if employees were unhealthily obsessed with doing their jobs. then they try and manipulate their own people into doing the same thing.
"great, you can pay them average salaries and they will be so loyal to your giant company"
The point is that they become loyal to each other, the company reaping a reward is just a side benefit of people working towards a common goal.
I was on a similar 'elite' skunkworks dev team in a company of ~ 35,000 that had executive support, and the results were insanely good. You can't manipulate people to do this; You can however give them the freedom to make it happen.
I really, really hope that the team that's in charge of Apple's app review process doesn't start emulating these guys, with legal things instead of technical things. Though it seems like they kind of already have.
[+] [-] DrJokepu|16 years ago|reply
After reading this article I have realized that even at large corporations if you make isolated and largely idependent small teams of highly competent people that can select their members themselves, you can create "startup" bubbles inside the organization that can deliver outstanding results. Maybe this is the way to go when growing large, from a medium-sized enterprise to a large corporation?
[+] [-] tom_b|16 years ago|reply
A more nuanced view might focus on how corporate culture, a short term focus on sales due to stock market pressures, and the inevitable lack of accountability that seems to shield the management chain from harm provided they continue to take no risks around innovation combine to create some weird effects. Look in particular at how some big software providers make acquisitions, which are then polished and re-branded as a new version solution and then shoved into a customer pipeline.
These customer pipelines are the real magic - no matter what junk gets shoved down them, nine times out of ten, junk gets paid for. Nobody on either side cares. Takes too much personal risk in the big corporate world to point out that the emperor wears no clothes.
Growing small teams of highly competent people seems to naturally lead to duplicated effort and turf wars as well. Don't think that a team of magic snowflakes will outshine all the "drips" hanging on . . . I've spent too much time in big corporate IT to not realize that most people walking the halls in these places are damn smart. They're just hamstrung by the corporate structure. But - this is why small startups have an advantage. They're not nailed down by convention.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|16 years ago|reply
If you are smart, you will develop an informal network of contacts/relationships throughout your organization. And keep your resume up to date. (I think that smart people develop such a network not only or even primarily out of a calculated decision to manage their career, but because they find interesting what other people know and do and struggle with and solve, and helping them.)
Perhaps this is one reason social skills (of a certain sort) tend to predominate in large organizations. Given the situation, they become the most essential tools to a career.
Also, regarding social equanimity, a large part of corporate life is "not rocking the boat". At lower ranks, this can imply a strong uniformity of treatment. Your increase will be between 0% and 4%, regardless, because those are the absolute limits that have been chosen. If someone were to receive 10%, there would be a lot of jealousy and unrest. The only way to larger increases is promotion. Promotion changes one's duties. Ergo, certain duties will never be compensated beyond "industry standards". The social structure caps their compensation and so, minus the individual who 'self-sacrifices', their effectiveness.
And this is, in part, where your "average or below-average" coworkers come from. Management won't sweeten the pot, even if, as the posted story implies, going after the top of the talent pool produces far greater returns than the additional investment.
I guess this comment is kind of thrown together. Large social structures tend to enforce norms and drift towards a lowest common denominator. Exceptions occur, but over time, they are fighting the tide.
[+] [-] philwelch|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|16 years ago|reply
This had little to do with competence! The team was successful because it grouped together some people who actually enjoyed their job. Individually, they were only slightly better at it than their peers; as a group of "like-minded individuals" (quoted from the article), they spent much more energy collaborating on ways to improve their software testing process.
"Like-minded" is only tangentially related to intelligence or competence or any of the other traits that arrogant people like to ascribe to themselves. It's really about people that have similar priorities and styles and work well together.
[+] [-] roc|16 years ago|reply
Consider: it would be in the best interest of any project manager to steer their project away from the Black Team. They aren't incentivized to ship good software, but to ship on schedule. And should avoidance be impossible, they absolutely will point corporate HR at any and every aspect of that strong team, to break-up, slow-down or demoralize them.
Similarly, with higher-up management. They'll need certain projects to be treated with kid gloves. So they'll scheme and conspire to either defeat the team and ruin its effectiveness or defeat the process, so that the team's effectiveness is rendered moot.
It's the perverted reward structure in large corporations that causes most of their problems. There's no lack of people trying to fix those problems. But any solution (including this one) will ultimately be defeated so long as that reward structure remains.
[+] [-] arockwell|16 years ago|reply
I couldn't find a good source for how many employees they have, but its in the thousands, so they have been able to make this work on a large scale.
[+] [-] DannoHung|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdevlin|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colbyolson|16 years ago|reply
Edit: I tried searching for anything related to IBM and their Black Team. It seems Google saturates my search request with everything linking back to this article.
Perhaps someone could help?
[+] [-] nomoresecrets|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willwagner|16 years ago|reply
Basically, it can lead to having a rift between developers and QA, and in a big corporation, it can become a bureaucratic mess and a 'us' vs. 'them' attitude between groups. I've been in long heated meetings between QA and Dev arguing over individual bugs, not so much on behalf of the customer as opposed to face-saving exercise.
From the article: "And the things they did to software went beyond all bounds of rational use testing and were more akin to software torture." In a perfect world with unlimited time, it's great to find bugs through contortions but usually there is some costs associated with it either with QA not focused on other areas that matter, or having a developer focused on confirming that bug as opposed to working on something else.
Sometimes it's great in a bigger organization to have a unique culture so I agree with the jist of the article and to other HN comments. For instance, I worked at a company on a smaller Macintosh team that fostered a healthy competition with the much bigger Windows team which worked well. I'm just not so sure it works well when people are essentially working on the same project where interfacing with each other is a requirement.
[+] [-] alexandros|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcskeptic|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayvega|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raheemm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexgartrell|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wouterinho|16 years ago|reply
Love it!
[+] [-] raptorex|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] numbchuckskills|16 years ago|reply
The point is that they become loyal to each other, the company reaping a reward is just a side benefit of people working towards a common goal.
I was on a similar 'elite' skunkworks dev team in a company of ~ 35,000 that had executive support, and the results were insanely good. You can't manipulate people to do this; You can however give them the freedom to make it happen.
[+] [-] mtrichardson|16 years ago|reply