> Isn't that a good thing? If I were running a company, I would want the best people to focus on the things that had that highest impact on the bottom line. If grunt work is all you have, grunts are all you need.
That is why its a dangerous idea (to me). The people making these decisions frequently misjudge the facts on the ground about what is the "highest impact" on the bottom line.
It frequently means its a good starter who has no real understanding of the medium to long term maintenance issues created by their work. They also rarely suffer the consequences of bad decisions that make it into production but "work" for the first few weeks until they've been moved to a new project.
Let me give you an example of this scenario:
A team of high performers who deliver on time and on budget are given a project to launch a new Project integrated from Frontend to ERP. And, amazingly, they look like they will almost make it despite only getting 80% of the resources they originally asked for 12 months ago!
Awesome right? They did it.
Then, you bring in the mediocre gal who handled maintenance on the old system in for the last couple months while Team Awesome was getting the job DONE! They needed her to help them figure out how to deploy to production tho (she is the devops gal as well as the maintenance gal).
And in July (about a month into this), she goes "Guys, guys. This isn't going to work. We need to do X, Y, and Z. I know its technical and not customer facing but we risk f'n up <insert critical path item X we use to generate money>. I know its a bit late, but are you sure you want to automate everything to work off excel spreadsheets handled by <insert arrogant business guy>? We need to do load / integration testing with a mirror of the real data. I am not sure what we've done to test it is enough."
Team Awesome goes, "We are cutting it close and its important to meet the deadline. We spent a year working on this and we are sure things will work out."
Queue two weeks after the August launch and some minor bug fixes, Team Awesome moved on to a new project.
Things are rocky but seem workable for all of Sept. Maintenance Gal rings alarm bells about some weirdness with payment processing, etc. but is told there isn't time to look into it because "super important feature was missed and needs to be put in ASAP!!!"
Accounting starts reconciling things in Oct and realizes we misplaced $125k of which $50k was due to a shipping promotion the "system did not handle correctly". A member of Team Awesome gets pulled off a "very important project" to "help" turn things around. They claim they do and go back to the "very important project". Maintenance Gal sounds less like she is crying wolf at this point but is basically ignored by management.
November rolls around, biggest month of the year, and by the end of Cyber Monday panic ensues when the "fix" turns out to have not worked correctly and Arrogant Business Guy "worked around it" again. $400k in unintended expenses are racked up. Integration falls over and distribution has to upgrade shipping on thousands of orders. Another six figure expense.
By Christmas, "Team Awesome" is deflecting blame onto the only person that has worked on the project since August (Maintenance Gal who has done little but ring alarm bells about launching it being a bad idea and working overtime to hotfix issues).
Non-technical stakeholders still think Team Awesome is Awesome. Maintenance Gal is called into a meeting where they planned to put her on a PIP where Management basically accuses her of pushing that particular unit of the Company into the red with her incompetence. She defends herself as best she can with the documentation of her concerns in July, August, September, October, and November.
Sometimes Maintenance Gal becomes Unemployed Gal. Sometimes someone else does.
----
I've watched this happen to multiple people at multiple employers at this point. Its left me a bit disillusioned with the idea of "top performers" who focus on getting involved on the highest impact projects they can at any given time.
I probably should mention at this point I've never been fired or laid off in my ~10 year career. The one time this particularly freight train was aimed at me, I started interviewing in August and my two week notice was in the Monday after I was called in for the PIP discussion. I had been just waiting for my background check to clear by the time the PIP came up.
You might think that is specific enough to work out my identity (if anyone cared too) but I've seen similar things happen enough times I know that isn't possible. Lol. :)
Yes. I've seen that too. But that's a result of poor management.
I designed our current system from scratch, hired people, mentored existing junior developers, etc. and my manager was constantly questioning me about scaleability, maintainability, fault tolerance, logging, devops, security, etc.
I also asked her to always question my decisions and keep me honest. I ask everyone on the team to question my assumptions.
It sounds to me like your definition of "high performer" is really "good politician." I know plenty of high performers who follow through all the way to deployment, monitor the program in production, and take full ownership of the entire thing.
That is why its a dangerous idea (to me). The people making these decisions frequently misjudge the facts on the ground about what is the "highest impact" on the bottom line.
It frequently means its a good starter who has no real understanding of the medium to long term maintenance issues created by their work. They also rarely suffer the consequences of bad decisions that make it into production but "work" for the first few weeks until they've been moved to a new project.
Let me give you an example of this scenario:
A team of high performers who deliver on time and on budget are given a project to launch a new Project integrated from Frontend to ERP. And, amazingly, they look like they will almost make it despite only getting 80% of the resources they originally asked for 12 months ago!
Awesome right? They did it.
Then, you bring in the mediocre gal who handled maintenance on the old system in for the last couple months while Team Awesome was getting the job DONE! They needed her to help them figure out how to deploy to production tho (she is the devops gal as well as the maintenance gal).
And in July (about a month into this), she goes "Guys, guys. This isn't going to work. We need to do X, Y, and Z. I know its technical and not customer facing but we risk f'n up <insert critical path item X we use to generate money>. I know its a bit late, but are you sure you want to automate everything to work off excel spreadsheets handled by <insert arrogant business guy>? We need to do load / integration testing with a mirror of the real data. I am not sure what we've done to test it is enough."
Team Awesome goes, "We are cutting it close and its important to meet the deadline. We spent a year working on this and we are sure things will work out."
Queue two weeks after the August launch and some minor bug fixes, Team Awesome moved on to a new project.
Things are rocky but seem workable for all of Sept. Maintenance Gal rings alarm bells about some weirdness with payment processing, etc. but is told there isn't time to look into it because "super important feature was missed and needs to be put in ASAP!!!"
Accounting starts reconciling things in Oct and realizes we misplaced $125k of which $50k was due to a shipping promotion the "system did not handle correctly". A member of Team Awesome gets pulled off a "very important project" to "help" turn things around. They claim they do and go back to the "very important project". Maintenance Gal sounds less like she is crying wolf at this point but is basically ignored by management.
November rolls around, biggest month of the year, and by the end of Cyber Monday panic ensues when the "fix" turns out to have not worked correctly and Arrogant Business Guy "worked around it" again. $400k in unintended expenses are racked up. Integration falls over and distribution has to upgrade shipping on thousands of orders. Another six figure expense.
By Christmas, "Team Awesome" is deflecting blame onto the only person that has worked on the project since August (Maintenance Gal who has done little but ring alarm bells about launching it being a bad idea and working overtime to hotfix issues).
Non-technical stakeholders still think Team Awesome is Awesome. Maintenance Gal is called into a meeting where they planned to put her on a PIP where Management basically accuses her of pushing that particular unit of the Company into the red with her incompetence. She defends herself as best she can with the documentation of her concerns in July, August, September, October, and November.
Sometimes Maintenance Gal becomes Unemployed Gal. Sometimes someone else does.
----
I've watched this happen to multiple people at multiple employers at this point. Its left me a bit disillusioned with the idea of "top performers" who focus on getting involved on the highest impact projects they can at any given time.
I probably should mention at this point I've never been fired or laid off in my ~10 year career. The one time this particularly freight train was aimed at me, I started interviewing in August and my two week notice was in the Monday after I was called in for the PIP discussion. I had been just waiting for my background check to clear by the time the PIP came up.
You might think that is specific enough to work out my identity (if anyone cared too) but I've seen similar things happen enough times I know that isn't possible. Lol. :)