Many high performing people receive great compensation, at least in financially flush fields like technology, and maximizing compensation isn't everyone's game. In fact, I'd say that high performers are often less distracted by that than most.

What keeps a sufficiently paid high performer around, usually, is a personally rewarding and comfortable work environment. What that means can vary quite a lot though, making it hard to summarize in blogspam and short comments.

That article advocates for paying them what they are worth, even if it exceeds the salary of higher-ups.

I am not aware of any role in tech (or really anywhere in wage labor) where people are being paid what they are worth. Nearly every job that exists gets paid a whole lot less than they make for the company, sometimes millions less per year.

So I'd say, pay us all what we are worth, and pay the high performers proportionally more.

They will never do that. Gaslit high performers are the profit delta of any team.

> Managing high performers? Step one: pay them what they're worth.

Don't forget that no all companies can pay what they're worth... most companies don't.

That’s great when what they want to do is aligned with what the organization needs. It’s essentially not-managing.

The issue is, many times high performers just aren’t aligned with what needs doing, and by not-managing them, inexperienced managers create a world where you have tons of “high performance” arriving absolutely nowhere. You see this at every bloated organization (in particular at big tech).

I’ve got a high performer on my team and I do think (okay, wouldn’t I ;) that in managing speed vs quality and explicit attention to the learning curve of others I’ve managed to create a few more golden nuggets. No high performer (perhaps: nobody, ever) has all professional skills in the same measure.

Coaching exists. I've had it and done it. I've worked with folks with disabilities too and been able to help them grow.

The problem is that companies often promote folks with excellent technical skills into people centric roles like an EM. Sometimes you get lucky and they are naturally good at the stuff. But more often than not, they really struggle. It's a conundrum. If you hire someone who nails it on the people stuff but is weaker on the technical side then they aren't able to make informed decisions.

I've been head of eng before. It's a hard job and I ultimately switched jobs to go back to IC work. I took the coaching aspect seriously when I was in the role though. I think ultimately you need to understand what your report wants and give them projects, feedback, and resources to achieve those goals. The big caveat being that sometimes the role that person is looking for isn't available. You can't have an entire team of principle engineers for example. So another aspect is to be clear about what is and isn't possible in terms of career path at your co. and try to find other incentives like pay etc to keep them happy. YMMV of course.

That's annoying. What do you feel you're struggling with? What's your disability?

That's probably in part because mid-level management (like me) didn't get promoted to that role because we are great coaches. I spend the vast majority of my time putting out fires, protecting the team from bullshit, making offerings to the audit monster and running the corporate HR playbook. I probably spend an hour a month for each of my 15 directs really trying to think how to help them improve their skills and advance their career.

> I'm convinced real coaching doesn't exist.

Aristotle would disagree.

I've noticed this too. If you want to get better, you're basically responsible for doing it in your own time. Using work time for unproductive learning seems frowned on and punished.

This is where I see most people burning out and leaving.

At my company we recently had three product managers leaving because they were forced to do someone else's job.

Most companies are happy to keep taking without additional compensation.

That's a huge risk for the company: if you let them do that for long enough, they may help other employees become high performers as well! /s

> and ignoring his often legitimate complaints. It does not address the question why high performers sometimes get irritable. The reasons can range from people intriguing against them with lies to being underappreciated.

This one stuck out at me too. We now have "architect" roles, and one of them was assigned to our group, having never even looked at our legacy codebases before, and during a meeting my response to what he wanted was pretty close to what's in this post - "that doesn't make sense / isn't a good idea". I didn't have a good on-the-spot explanation at that moment, it came from years of experience working with this legacy system, that I had to later figure out how to summarize all of that and put that intuition into words.

Probably some kind of worry "but what if we spend our money coaching them... and then they leave?"

The same reason tech companies generally don't spend money training their employees, etc.

I guess it depends on what you mean by less capable. I've had great managers that had pretty negligible technical skills but they were able to provide me with good direction and made sure that I wasn't wasting my time on work that didn't matter. And on the flip side I've had bosses that were way better at my job than I was but they were not at all fun to work for, for a variety of reasons.

I disagree. Sports gives lots of great examples... the all-time greats almost always fail as coaches. But great coaches often come from the ranks of the less successful players and get more out of the greats. I've seen the same over and over in software engineering.

Nobody, not even the best, is perfect. Even if they are perfect today, things constantly change, and they need to grow to accommodate change. A good manager will have different context (e.g., from being in more meetings than high performers have capacity for) and be able to synthesize information for them. They will see what is working for other high performers more deeply and share that. They will be a good sounding board. They will be someone who can listen. They will be someone who will be honest about what they are seeing. And they will know when to get themselves and others out of the way.

Also, part of being a great high performer is learning how to collaborate with a manager on growth. A manager can't do nearly as much to help if the high performer is not being reflective, looking for opportunity, willing to change / grow, and being vulnerable enough with the manager to share all of that. People who are really good at this can get more out of all but the worst managers.

That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of terrible managers just getting in the way. But there are great managers too, even those who weren't the highest performers as ICs.

This is a silly idea. Managing is a different skill than performing (at any task). Usain Bolt's coach was not a very fast sprinter. LeBron James' coach at Miami was merely a middling basketball player.

Not true theirs is plenty of mediocre players that become great coaches. I really cannot see why IT would be different.

This won't go over well here, but: we might have to dismantle a lot of the economy if we want to fix draining overproducers until you can discard them...

That's only true if you expect managers to control the people they lead. Another approach is to empower them instead. As a manager my expectation is that each of my direct reports eventually grows to be better at their job than I am at their job. My job is to make sure they have clarity on the team and organizational goals, make sure my management has visibility and confidence in our team, and create a healthy, high trust environment that allows my team members to work at their best. Again, it is my hope and desire that my reports exceed my own expertise. Additionally, management is itself a different skillset.

It's also a lot harder to recognize high performance at these companies because of the natural impediments to getting anything done. If you aren't on the right project, or if your leadership doesn't understand/advocate for your work, or if you're just constantly churning through reorgs, etc. Large complex systems breed large complex bureaucracies to manage them and the skills to understand and manipulate one don't necessarily translate to the other.

I’m at a FAANG right now and this couldn’t be further from the truth.

We basically bought out a ton of A- to A+ players from the rest of the industry and there are many high performers developing entire modules of core functionality themselves with a team of juniors and contractors supporting them. I also have a hunch they make $350-$750k.

Have you ever worked in faang? I disagree