zlacker

How does that align with Dan Luu’s article “95th percentile isn’t that good”[1] and the general observation so many of us have that the companies we work for and interact with and buy from are executing so badly on so many fronts?

That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.

If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?

[1] https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

>>jodrel+(OP)
a small focused group of tryers is probably a big help

>>jodrel+(OP)
Because of switching costs. If you start a new thing this is definitely the case. It’s often said that a new product (startup), can’t be a marginal improvement; it needs to be 10x better. 95 percentile is not 10x

>>jodrel+(OP)
I think what you are missing:

- not everything is worth doing extraordinarily as no one will pay for excellence of some services or goods

- being exceptionally good at something doesn’t guarantee someone will buy from you, people might just don’t like you or your branding

- there are bunch of other market forces that you have to overcome and Dan seems like was writing about being 95% on a single thing

>>jodrel+(OP)
Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc.

Of course it was eventually taken over by product managers, bureaucratic bloat, and WLB maxxers. I think my observation only applies to a company in its ascendance. As it matures, the 50th percentilers and the MBAs take over. And it slowly declines. Less slowly if it has achieved a monopoly (search, in the Google case).

>>jodrel+(OP)
It aligns, because 95th percentile isn't that good. It's right there in the title.

Exceptional, outsized, market-beating results often only happen once you crack the one-in-a-thousand levels of effort, talent, etc.

The combination of two things both at 95th percentile is one way you can get there, but - obviously - staying at that level at multiple, mutually-reinforcing fronts simultaneously is harder than staying there for just one skill.

>>jodrel+(OP)
>If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?

Inertia. It's very difficult to outrun someone who has a head start.

>>next_x+fm
Yep, 1,000,000%, yep, can't +1 this enough, saw it at another big tech myself, had friends who saw it happen at Google. The companies that were going from nothing to dominance were so different from the companies that rest today on their monopoly laurels. To go from not successful to successful there were all these insanely smart people pulling 80 hour weeks and all the work life balance stuff came later. Unreasonably hard work doesn't guarantee success but it's always a component of massive success. Mr. Beast is not making this shit up and if you're not down for this you are one of his C employees which is fine, you can be a nice and valuable human in other ways, but those companies who want to go big are not for you. Starting a company, certainly a VC fueled one probably is not either.

>>next_x+fm
> "Notice that I gave as an example the early days of Google. In those days, it was stacked with 99th percentilers working full tilt: Sergey and Larry, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, Luiz André Barroso, Urs Hölzle, Amit Singhal, etc."

and it was up against Yahoo! one of the most famously directionless bumbling tech companies, and their peers. Yahoo! didn't seem like it was executing on almost all cylinders with almost LASER focus on some goal, so why did it take 99%ilers working full tilt and an innovative idea (PageRank) and an innovative model (off-shelf Intel/Linux clusters instead of 'real' expensive server class hardware like Sun and mainframes) and Silicon Valley funding to beat them?

If you're not at a FAANG or similar, your coworkers are average, maybe disinterested, the processes and procedures seem almost designed to slow and frustrate progress, managers don't know much about the job and hate making decisions or taking risk; shouldn't it be possible to outdo half the companies which exist, and most of the companies which fail, by doing just slightly better work than average?

Where's that discrepancy coming from?

>>safety+jh1
"you need to be insanely smart and work 80 hour weeks" ... to pass a bunch of MBAs managing 50-percentilers? How does that make sense?

>>jodrel+ws2
It makes sense because regulatory capture has become such a large part of how dominant American firms maintain their position. They don't maintain it through talent. They maintain it by breaking the law. Google's now been found guilty of antitrust violations in two markets and a case about a third just kicked off. And of course this is not just in tech, take a look at the cases against the Kroger/Albertson's merger or Ticketmaster.

The Biden administration is basically the first one to take these violations of antitrust law seriously since Carter.

>>jodrel+ws2
The goal is achieved. The founders are rich and fulfilled (and probably exhausted), early star employees have mostly cashed out. This is not at all surprising or hard to figure out. Larry Page tried to establish a corporate structure that would sustain innovation (Google -> Alphabet) but they were never able to recreate what they had in search.

>>jodrel+Zq2
You might be stretching Dan Luu's essay a bit far. It's been a while since I read it, but my recollection of it was him saying the 95th percentile in an arbitrary hobby, say amateurs playing competitive esports (e.g. Overwatch), and that if you put even a small amount of time into deliberate practice, you would be better than 95th percentile player in Overwatch. I didn't get the sense Dan Luu was extrapolating to multi-billion dollar companies, what it would take to take the fight to them, and taking their market share.