Ignored By Dinosaurs 🦕

I read an article earlier this week about lessons learned between $5MM and $100MM in ARR. To the layperson – this means growing a small company into a larger company, as measured by its yearly revenue.

One of the points in the article (maybe more, I don't remember) was about hiring, and it referenced the old adage

A players hire other A players. B players hire C players…

While this sounds like one of those BS businessisms that some capitalist dude came up with, I absolutely believe it to be true. The HN comments section had multiple threads with commenters asking the totally reasonable question “Who's hiring these B players anyway?”. After all, if all you have to do is only hire A players, why would anyone hire a B player in the first place?

I went for a jog yesterday and decided to imagine some of the scenarios that might lead to B player infiltration of a company..

—————————

I imagine a common scenario is known in some circles as the Peter Principle. A talented IC (individual contribute, ie not a manager) is promoted into management. The IC work that came naturally to them is no longer their job and they have to learn a new set of skills to be an effective manager.

These skills are, frankly, not their thing and so they don't pick them up as readily and as hungrily as the more fun thing they used to do. One of those skills is learning how to hire good people. Their responsibilities and workload are growing every week, so eventually they have to hire but due to circumstance they rush through the process and hire a less than great teammate.

The formerly A player has committed a B player mistake. Will they learn from it and grow, or will they just put their head back down and keep moving?

——————————

Sometimes B and C players actually do hire A players. B players aren't dumb, after all, they do want to hire good talent. They just don't possess the skills or the confidence or the humility to grow their potential, so they set about micromanaging them into C players.

——————————

I personally think this one is very common, but I've never seen it discussed – the B player founded the company. They were born into a wealthy family, they raised their first round off of family connections or their last name. They look the part, they belong to the right social circles and at the end of the day that counts for a lot in this society.

The B player founder is never challenged to do better, indeed they are surrounded by evidence of their skill and business acumen. They hire B player after B player into the senior leadership ranks and because they are already rich, and because they are smart enough to avoid running the company into the ground, the company keeps going.

The company thus has an entire leadership culture of B players and the last thing a B player wants is to let an A player anywhere in the room. Money has its own gravity, and so these companies end up succeeding anyway. It's depressing if you think about it too much.

————————————

So the answer in all 3 scenarios above to the question “who is hiring these B players in the first place” is your leadership.

#business #management

Been reading the Harry Potter books for a few years with the family at night, and in the middle gets introduced this thing of Dumbledore's called the “Pensieve”, which is like a bowl into which Dumbledore can put his memories so he doesn't have to keep them all in his head.

I just realized I've been doing this, sort of, for the last year or so. I'm full on manager now, all I do is phones calls for the first half of any given day. I started taking notes with pen and paper sometime last year. Lately it's a lot of thoughts I don't want to forget, or questions I want to ask but don't want to interrupt the speaker.

It started out as organized, action items to follow up on or something that made me feel more organized. Now I just think the physical act of writing things down with a pen is really helpful, with a bonus that I have a few things that make sense to me later when look back on it.

#life

I'm working through some thoughts in my head about social media, as I've been doing since founding this blog well over a decade ago. Back then I thought it was going to be a savior of democracy in oppressed societies around the world, and we see how that's turned out.

Lately it's an issue closer to home. My kids are creators. At some point years back they got inspired by Captain Underpants and started making their own comic books. We have bookshelves full of 8 inch sketch pads from AC Moore (RIP) and our middle son especially made visual art and story telling his thing. It's amazing to see how far he and they have come, especially with the story telling part.

In recent years, they've taken to making movies with iMovie and other tools like it with an iPad. They've started making animated movie shorts as well. None of this is the stuff they want to post on YouTube, but I know it's coming.

My middle son went and signed himself up a YouTube account. He's been posting content lately, mostly gameplay stuff from Minecraft. His brothers, of course, want their own YouTube accounts and so far I've said “no” without really understanding the why. Michelle hit on it the other day when she said to one of them “I don't want anyone telling you what you're worth” and I think that's it.

Especially when you're young, other people's opinions matter a lot. Social media is a wide open gate to put yourself out there and be judged in the form of likes and subscribes, and no matter what they think they will or won't care about, the human brain is wired to want to fit in with a community. The part that really bothers me WRT the boys is that the stuff that gets likes and subscribes is often the lowest common denominator and I don't want them molding their creativity around that. We've seen how that plays out.

#life

“Run your data team like it's a product team” was a common refrain at the DBT conference for the last two years. What does that mean? I am still figuring that out, but I have had an aha in the last few weeks about what a “data product” is, exactly.

Your standard software development process requires two main components to deliver the Things – a software developer and her wits. She takes those wits and expresses them into a text editor, and thereby makes something from truly nothing.

Data products differ in 1 key way – they require raw materials in the form of data. The process of building a data product therefore requires at least 1 additional step that standard software product development does not – refining that data into something consumable by the system that is delivering the product.

There can potentially be an additional step even before this one, which is to get the data in the first place. My current employer built an Observability suite and stack to be able to deliver metrics to our customers about their projects that they run/host here. This process took multiple quarters because the entire metrics creation and delivery pipeline had to be built from scratch. Once the data existed, it was then a process of refining the materials and building the product.

The good news is that many data products can be consumed in a standard way through some kind of BI or reporting or data visualization tool, we use Metabase. It has taken me a while to understand that the method of delivery of the products is the more standardized part, whereas the gathering and refinement of the raw materials/data is where the action is.

#analytics #business #data

Headed to dinner last night with the fam, this song comes on (Deep Waves I think?) and my oldest says “oh, this song”. Michelle, cutely, starts looking for something to like about it. I, predictably, do the opposite.

So here's the observation -

Basically all pop music these days is made exclusively on computers. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but what's missing is the accidental interactivity that happens when you have a group of people playing instruments and giving each other things to play off of. This, in my opinion, is partly why shit is so boring these days. Pull up a couple premade loops, add a bassline that's worked a hundred times for you before, add some trite lyrics and ship it. That's all that seems to get picked up these days, right?

The wonderful thing about playing music with people is that people are imperfect, and these imperfections are where the interesting bits come from. Everything out of a pop music computer is, by definition, predictable.

#music

I was listening to Taylor Swift yesterday – Everything Has Changed from her new version of the album. There's this bit in the bridge at about 2:30 where the backgrounds do this “haaaa, ahhhh, ahhhh” thing that's so wonderfully out of tune and everybody involved in the making of this album had the courage to leave it.

Nobody does that anymore. I started thinking about how auto-tune has really enabled the elimination of musical talent as a condition for creating music, and made it that much easier to just create pure product with no musical value at all.

Get off my lawn.

#music

I am on my way to San Diego for the first Platformer meetup thing that I've been to since the Beforetimes, at least the first that's not just my team. On my way to San Diego I stopped by Austin for the FinOpsX conference, an amazing little thing put on by ... maybe the Linux Foundation through some other community community, idk.

Anyway, it was really amazing. Open source is just so much fun, I'm really glad that I found it all those years ago. This conference was smallish, like 400 people, but had all the open source vibes that the Drupal scene had back in the day, or the Python scene had the only time I dipped my toes in a few years back.

I'm really rather enjoying my gig these days after a long dark winter of feeling pretty hollowed out. Been doing some work and am feeling much healthier now. One of the lovely things about going to a conference or just getting outside your bubble in general is learning a little about how other companies operate.

See, here inside the bubble at Platform it seems sometimes like everything is going to take so long, and it's so difficult coordinating all these people and their worklives. Sometimes it's hard to see the bigger picture. One of my main takeaways is that we actually have our act together in many, many ways at Platform and one of the way in which I am most proud is in our data setup where pretty much everything we need is in a place where you can find it. Most companies don't even have this much.

I am about to fully inherit the FinOps function here when one of my people moves on to a new gig in a few weeks, and I'm mostly pretty excited about the opportunity to remake a little part of the world here that seems to cause a couple people some stress.

So yeah, somehow data and finance are the things that are interesting to me now.

#life #finops

Just thought I'd drop myself a line here and remind me about that time that I was getting FinOps certified, because it's so much more interesting than I would've thought.

Basically, back in the old days, there were data centers and if you wanted a new resource in one of those data centers you had to go through a procurement cycle involving finance and probably a procurement team. You'd buy the resource and that would count as Cap Ex in your P&L or whatever. It'd get installed and then you could use it. That Cap EX would be depreciated and the world would keep turning, pretty predictably, just like the Finance teams likes it.

This meant much longer planning and procurement loops for most technology teams, loops that are gone now in the era of “Cloud” and “devops” generally. This is mostly great. It also meant that the old methods of controlling costs are gone and that the ability to spend company money has been handed directly to development teams. This is potentially bad.

This should require much more feedback between the two teams – Eng and Finance – and much greater visibility into the company's resource usage for the Eng teams spending the money.

This is FinOps. A continual process of building, monitoring, and optimizing that allows companies to move SO much faster than they used to be able to.

#business #finops

This blog...

This blog is interesting to myself because like I said in a recent-ish post – it really maps out a 12 year master Dunning Kruger cycle in technology, with baby Dunning Kruger journeys into different topic areas along the way. Early in this blog I had so much to say. Later in this blog I am aware of how much I don't know. The post frequency maps almost exactly with this chart that I recently took a look at again:

#life

I don't know, this just came to me. For several months now I've been trying to make some changes to old behaviors. One of them is a lack of communicating, of building up a thing or a plan in my head without talking it over with the people whom it affects.

I've summarized this as something like

When I have a good idea – when I see the path – I assume everyone sees it too.

So I've been making more of an effort to communicate everything in the last few months, whether it's the Big Idea that I have at work or the difficult conversation that I don't want to have with this coworker.

It just popped in my head a second ago that part of the reason that people don't see The Path is that it's not their path. They have their own paths they're moving down. It's my job to explain my path to them as soon and as often as possible, especially if I need their help getting down it.

#life