I was working as on a corporate dev team that hit a goldmine at one point, causing management to freak out and go on a hiring spree. They brought at least three wolves on board within a period of a couple months. One of them reminded me of the portrayal of Kameto Kuroshima in the 1970 film "Tora Tora Tora". He would think and think for hours on end, then he'd emerge from his cubicle (all sweaty and dramatic) with a Plan. At that point everything had to change because everyone knew his experience levels blew us all away. When he attended meetings, it was like he was five steps ahead of everybody else, and later I realized that it was because the meetings were usually called as a result of something he decided should change. I could easily see most of the people above him being fired if this guy ever got pissed.
One of the other wolves was an experienced college professor who was brought in as a team lead, but who for all intents and purposes was an SVP in the organizational hierarchy. He was financially independent at a fairly young age and basically gave inspirational speeches and CS lectures instead of meetings. We were all freshmen to this guy, and he was light years ahead of our experience levels.
I liked these wolves, if that's what they were--they gave me hope that somewhere an executive was really freaked out about making the right call at a critical time.
Interesting explanation. Maybe you're not gonna be able to share that, but I would be curious to see some examples of what they did, that is so exceptional. Did they decide to rewrite some critical module using language/framework X, which resulted in a crazy performance gain? Did they completely change the architecture of something which made the whole company (or a whole group of devs) much more efficient?
As I recall, they made the existing software architecture more scalable, maintainable, and available. This was no mean feat, either. Our clients were pretty huge, well-known companies. There was quite a bit of language & framework discussion to go along with all that. But I think their experience levels also just allowed them to accomplish more in less time. To us, they looked like superheroes. We'd get mental blocks trying to think through situations that they had long ago met and conquered. In a similar vein, I think if most of us here at HN went back to our first job, we'd be well ahead of the curve and probably considered "wolves" in a very short time.
I pity the new developpers just starting their career and reading those kind of articles without the minimum amount of skepticism and distance required.
Please, if you don't have at least two or three years of actual programming in a real company, don't try to become a "10x" something, or "ninja" or "wolf" or whatever world of warcraft character a manager would like to describe people as.
Just be a good employee. Do as being told, and as neil gaiman would say, just "make good art".
I would't call someone a wolf -- it kind of makes the caller sounds like a tool imo -- but I think I have seen different types of engineers along these lines. The sort of people who build projects, getting them to the point where a rough draft is useable then increasingly refining them until you have a 1.0 or maybe a 2.0, do not seem to be the sort of people who are good at taking a 2.0 to a 5.0. The latter need, and need a tolerance for, process which seems to kill the former.
Also, the problem with doing as told is you are taking for granted that the person doing the telling is worth listening to. My advice to most new grads is don't do startups. Go to a company like google or fb for the first 2 or 3 years and get a solid handle on good software engineering practices, then go do startups.
+ At least moderate technical skill, which is acquired thru study and experience.
+ Significant domain knowledge (understanding of the problem being solved), again acquired thru study and experience.
+ Sufficient familiarity with the organization you're working in to know what you can and can't get away with, acquired thru social interaction.
+ Ability to find unexpected better solutions to things. Unless someone's figured out how to teach this, it just requires lots of practice with good feedback.
The only "in your nature" here, is whether you find these things interesting enough to put in the required study/practice time.
Training is perfunctory, but method of acquisition may be atypical. The personality type is not limited to computer science. Obviously it has a larger scope...
I think trying to control the variable is optimistic or unethical. It is kinda a black swan. It seems like you would require substantial behaviour modification and would mess with the wolf to soldier ratio.
If you want a great read, check out Leadership by Gen. Hillier. There is an entire chapter on this.
I think the key feature of a "wolf" as described here is a willingness to ignore the official leadership and management structures. That is definitely something that has a string built-in component.
What differentiates those people from the success stories? Misdirected effort? Too much on the lone wolf side of things so they never get feedback (and thus misdirect their effort)?
One of my great fears is putting in the study/time and getting no results.
This is at least a somewhat divisive view, but I think that it's to a large degree straight up aptitude.
Some people are good at some things. They pick them up quickly, flesh out their skills quickly, and apply those skills well in an almost intuitive way. You can call this "intelligence," but some people will be very intelligent in other ways, and have no aptitude for a particular skill.
Maybe the aptitude is innate in your biology, maybe it's the result of nurture in your childhood, maybe it's even somewhat learnable as an adult, I don't know, but when you teach people things, some of them pick it up and apply it well, and others are much slower.
I really like the idea and agree since I've met a couple of people who could meet that description. The problem always seems to be identifying the Wolves from the Cowboys. ie. Telling the difference between a "10x" coder who will live outside the rules and get things done, versus a "10x" coder who lives outside the rules and leaves you with a humungous mess of undocumented, unmaintainable spaghetti code when he leaves. Resulting in potential negative productivity by the end.
Does anyone know any reliable ways of telling the difference? Beforehand I mean; it's easy to tell in hindsight. Or is it better to avoid hiring both Wolves and Cowboys, but count your blessings if you accidentally get a Wolf anyway?
From what I've seen, the difference with the depth of understanding of the organization- its mission, goals, capabilities, and failings, and commitment to work with the organization's interests in mind.
The Cowboy is- consciously or not- out for himself, and imagines the organization to be something other than it is in order to be able to present himself with some technical problem that he wants to solve. The problem the Cowboy is solving for is more or less irrelevant in the context of a deep understanding of the needs of the organization.
The Wolf is aware of the organization as it is, works to solve the most important problem the organization faces, using technology, whether or not others in the management or executive hierarchy understand.
This situation can arise particularly in older organizations that are in the midst of making a major transition, or facing major competitive or existential pressures. Strong engineers are often able to see the new physics by which digital businesses need to operate by before others, and may need to make decisions in accordance with that physics.
TLDR: the Cowboy solves deep technical problems that are irrelevant to the business. The Wolf solves deep business problems using technology.
> Does anyone know any reliable ways of telling the difference? Beforehand I mean; it's easy to tell in hindsight.
Sure, here are some:
* Ask the opinion of people who have worked with the candidate.
* Arrange for the candidate to explain some of his recent code and its workings to someone unfamiliar with his specialty. +1 if the listener comes away understanding the code.
* Ask the candidate to write a short algorithm that solves an uncommon problem, see what kinds of methods and variable names he uses, and whether there are enough comments (not too many, not too few) and structural clarity that the code could be maintained by a third party.
Most programmers don't want to be replaced, but the dangerous ones are those who think they can't possibly be replaced. Some of the latter group code in such a way that their personal belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Spaghetti code isn't necessarily bad code. It's impossible to decide without understanding the business circumstances. Our job isn't to write code; it's to create business value. If the business value of doing a hack job really fast outweighs the cost of doing things in a maintainable way, it was the right thing to do.
Finally, the problem with hiring a so-called wolf is you can't. Acting that way relies on having credibility within the org that you can only build by having a track record of delivering stuff for senior execs. And that you can almost certainly only create by working for a company for a long time.
Spaghetti code isn't necessarily bad code.
.... understanding the business circumstances.
Our job isn't to write code; it's to create business value.
I'm not sure I agree. Superficially, that's true. However, I've frequently seen the "business circumstances" change dramatically from what had previously implemented. Sometimes it's a month later, sometimes a year later, but having a system where Someone Else can understand what's going on, and where there was a coherent design to deliver the business logic, has been critical to letting us change things easily, and know we did it right.
Hacking something out can work, but I'd be very very wary of saying "As long as it's creating more business value, it's OK" -- because it makes it more expensive to deliver future/changed business value next time.
In my experience, the change in business circumstances is precisely what creates the spaghetti code in the first place. It's far easier to write a beautiful extensible system if you have solid unchanging requirements - when the reqs change in foreseen ways that extensibility looks like great foresight. When the reqs change unpredictably, often all that work on extensibility is wasted or even detrimental because the changes required are deeper or different to what the original system made possible.
I think some of the art of software engineering is in the softer skill or predicting how requirements are likely to change in the future, and building in extensibility only where its likely to be needed (or is easy to get for free/cheap, which sometimes happens too.) It's like YAGNI vs pragmatism.
some of the art of software engineering is in ...
predicting how requirements are likely to change in the
future, and building in extensibility only where needed
I agree. I've definitely fallen into the trap of overengineering an extensible, multi-use solution for something that gets used once.
I've also been blessed to be encouraged by my boss to go all-in on reusability on a different feature, which turned out to have really paid dividends now that pretty much every subsequent feature request has been able to be handled without hassle.
It's definitely a skill I expect to continue to improve at over my career. :)
I think it's pretty rare to set out to hire a wolf, although a manager of a large, well-resourced team could do so just to shake things up. That would be tough, though, since it is very difficult to come in from the outside and perform as a wolf immediately.
My own experience has been, instead, that a wolf emerges from the herd after 6–12 months. They've learned the culture, they've learned the personalities, they've learned the dividing line between the strictly forbidden and the mostly forbidden. Your juvenile wolf will show a propensity for solving long-standing hard problems that had long been deferred or inventing new trifles. A cowboy may act similarly, but generally gets into more trouble and has less substance behind his solutions. A kludge is a hack that works; a wolf is a cowboy who gets the kill.
It is at this point that you must act to place new wolves in an environment where they can excel. I think customer-facing interdisciplinary teams work well, where success is demanded, glory is possible, market feedback is immediate, and they provide unique skills to the team. You can also place them on more seasoned technical teams, where the burden of management is a bit lighter.
I am a wolf (it's been over a decade since I told my first manager I wanted to become "the wolf", a la Pulp Fiction). There are downsides. The more process-driven the management, the more battles you will have to fight. The wolf often wins, but not without injury. Corporate combat is exhausting and, worse, can become an end unto itself. Also, being always on the hunt often precludes working on a single large project for a sustained period of time. A wise wolf must remember to hunt big game instead of feasting on readily-available mice.
In other words, it's easy for the wolf to become the asshole. Both proper management and self-awareness can keep this from happening.
>The problem always seems to be identifying the Wolves from the Cowboys. ie. Telling the difference between a "10x" coder who will live outside the rules and get things done, versus a "10x" coder who lives outside the rules and leaves you with a humungous mess of undocumented, unmaintainable spaghetti code when he leaves.
The problem is by-the-book, team-work friendly "soldiers" also tend to leave a mess of BS architecture decisions and crappy spaghetti code when they leave...
Spaghetti code sells the same alas. In the CF these are called fighting men. Average is that you train 8 guys and you will likely have 2 in the unit. Sometimes zero, sometimes three.
See how they operate in the trenches. Or give them a restrictive position to see who disobeys intelligently.
Keep in mind they like to eat, so feed them. Otherwise, well they get bored and sheep are tasty.
In my experience they mostly hate management, thinking they make poor decisions and don't understand the tech. They only want to talk to other very good technical people, which effectively means not communicating very few people. They probably are making good technical descisions that benefit the company, but never communicate this, so don't get the credit. They probably have an internal advocate (e.g. their boss) which communicates what they are doing and defends them.
I know a guy that could be described like this. He's a great programmer and he doesn't follow anyone else's rules but his own. And if you don't like it he'll tell you, politely, why you're wrong and why you should shove off because he's never going to do what you want him to. He has very little patience for meetings, paperwork, or typical processes that don't add anything to the software we're building.
When I first worked with him close to 20 years ago, he was fired very quickly. Reason? Because he took our Windows machines and installed Linux on them. Now that might be cowboy to some but in his mind he was helping us. Windows was shit in his mind and he was saving us. Doing the right thing trumped the consequences in his opinion.
I gotta say, he's had a tumultuous career, but he still manages to get paid more than I do and do whatever the hell he feels like. And he's made a lot of people a lot of money because of his ways.
There is a level that some employees and consultants reach where "Seniority" is no longer relevant, whether the Consultant is brought into the company either as a Contractor or as an Employee. When I'm brought in it is because no one at the company knows how to fix something, install something, and/or scale something. It doesn't matter how long I have or haven't been with the company, I get it done. I have been fired/terminated because the "Manager" was afraid he'd lose his job or have me promoted above him. I could give two shakes if you've been at a company for 15+ years and have "Seniority" over me. I have vast, real-world experience...you have your very narrow problem set of experience that culminated in not knowing how to do something that resulted in bringing me in. The differences are rarely, if ever, spoken aloud, but are confirmed daily.
The purpose of Mr. Wolf: Marcellus Wallace put him in charge, so they had to do what he said instead of fighting and wasting time. He paid off the guy whose garage they used to keep him friendly. He arranged and paid for the disposal of the corpse and the car. He drove the car with the body in the trunk so he was taking the risk of getting stopped by the police. He basically handled every aspect of the body disposal except for the manual labor.
No: he calmed them all down, organized them, AND told them exactly how to clean the mess and what to avoid, and gave them the confidence they needed to carry that through. Plus, he knew were to dispose of the body/car.
It's not a bizarro reading of the scene. The Wolf gets there, everyone assumes he'll be a big deal, a supercool "fixer", but he actually simply orders everyone to clean up, and comments on the coffee. So the audience's expectations get subverted. It's the whole point of the character -- and apparently user UweSchmidt above thought the same as me.
My downvoter seems to think I didn't like the character, but I thought it was genius.
There was a guy at the last place we worked we jokingly referred to as "the wolf" (pulp fiction man cite your sources). It basically worked like the movie where you'd come over to his cubicle and describe your problem - he'd go "yeah yeah aight mmmmhm" point by point like an interpreter. And the first time this happen you think he isn't paying attention but when you are done he'd process for a bit and the reliably spit out a usually great solution that took in balance the effort required and the business needs.
I also feel it's wolves who make the best entrepreneurs.
But everything is make against the entrepreneur wolf. Even accelerators may destroy the potential of a very strong vision that wolves can't explain. Steve Jobs was certainly a wolf.
Of all the Apple legends, I would not have picked Steve Jobs to fit the OP's description of a "wolf". Steve Wozniak seems a much more appropriate choice, given that he pretty much single-handedly wrote Apple BASIC (despite not formally studying compilers or languages himself), built the floppy disk (with some help), and the first connection between keyboard and terminal. From the various biographies of Woz and Jobs, it seems unlikely that Jobs would've even realized the potential of a color monitor had Woz not brilliantly designed it for maximal efficiency.
Consider that many organizational structures are designed to get maximum benefit from most employees - and, almost by definition, most employees are average. HR, for example, exists partly if not primarily to 1) identify those in the bottom fraction (whatever that fraction is) and make them harmless as painlessly as possible (this might mean getting them out the door or it might mean shunting to a position where the {harm, value, cost} equation works out adequately well; 2) identifying those in the middle and retaining them as cheaply as possible, possibly with non-financial incentives appealing to affiliation motives, sloganeering, etc.; and 3) to identify the crème-de-la-crème, the wolves, the going-places-and-will-rock-it-along-the-way, etc., and tailoring incentives, including compensation, for these.
I'd go so far as to say that most managers (not all, and not the best ones, but most) will attempt to game HR into forcing their misfits into the bottom fraction (these could be potentially stellar performers who don't fit with the manager) and will attempt to convince everyone that they have stars when they don't, because it makes them look good.
The managers and executives who want the top percentile players recognize that they have to fight HR to make the right things happen, because often HR, like all other organizations, is filled with average players who recognize those whose performance is below theirs and cannot fathom those whose performance is above - they see only the bared teeth, the feral eyes, and assume the wolf must be culled.
They do not recognize its value.
(Yeah, OK, this meandered a bit. Honestly, I'm too lazy to write it well, so I'm going for metaphorical effect. But you might know what I mean....)
It's an interesting theory, but I'd take it a step further. HR does not exist to do the identifying or the sorting per se. The sorting takes place at the executive levels, on down through the chain of management. HR just carries out the sorting. Formalizes it. HR cannot identify wolves, because HR does not perform that function in the first place. Management identifies the wolves and lets HR know that they're special. HR doesn't write the script; it carries out the script.
> almost by definition, most employees are average.
This is not clear to me at all. it may be that we have two equally numerous groups of employees, and the first class is three times as effective as the first class. In this example, no single employee is average, everyone is either 50% or 150% average workers.
You can make the numbers as extreme as you want and you can think of various explanations that would explain this skills gap's existence and persistence. (Maybe we are comparing different departments, the company has normal sales reps and stellar engineers.)
Was he? I have't read his biographies but my general impression is that while Steve Jobs was certainly a visionary and an entrepreneur, he was not really an engineer. Did he write a lot of code? Did he really engineer anything? Or did he surround himself with excellent engineers who could create his visions?
I worked around Steve for years, I couldn't stand him so I spent as little time in his company as possible, but I can say he wasn't an engineer or a serious coder. He was what is now called a "visionary", a catch-all phrase that can mean anything or nothing.
When Bill Gates saw bad code, he would sit down and rewrite the code to shame the perpetrator. Steve didn't have that option. This is how he acquired a deserved reputation as a tyrant -- he could only fire people or humiliate them before their coworkers, but he couldn't outperform them.
In the early days at Apple, and not to oversimplify, people like me coded the software, while Steve coded the customers.
On the general topic of Steve Jobs, I highly recommend the Isaacson biography, excellent book, and one that openly acknowledges Steve's core malady -- pathological narcissism.
> On the general topic of Steve Jobs, I highly recommend the Isaacson biography, excellent book, and one that openly acknowledges Steve's core malady -- pathological narcissism.
There are lots of great things in that book, like all the chances you get to see Isaacson's blissful ignorance of technology and apparent unwillingness to get his sources checked over. (Bill Gates is directly quoted in the book as saying a "disk drive has too low latency".)
Although he also skipped over most of the contributions by Steve's wife (instead Steve is just magically really good at business one day, totally unrelated to her?), he did seem intent on getting embarrassing quotes from their kids memorialized forever. I seem to remember Reed appearing in a few different chapters only to make dick jokes and leave.
>I worked around Steve for years, I couldn't stand him so I spent as little time in his company as possible
So, did you tell that to his face? Because this sounds like post-mortem sour grapes. As if all he did was shout at people and look at his fabulous self in the mirror...
He created and brought several companies to the top -- on of those twice, first from a garage, then from near banrunptcy.
And he did that while ignoring all the BS advice given by analysts and industry pundits, as well as the directions and fads of the industry for a whole decade.
Heck, his "most failed" company was sold off for $400 million, and ended up domineering the buyer company, saving it and leading it to become the hugest company in America.
> Because this sounds like post-mortem sour grapes.
Not really. Most people who worked closely with Jobs held the same views, and didn't express them. But read the Isaacson book, see for yourself. Narcissists aren't a role model for self-criticism or a willingness to hear the criticisms of others.
> Heck, his "most failed" company was sold off for $400 million, and ended up domineering the buyer company, saving it and leading it to become the hugest company in America.
You're overlooking several factors -- the influence of very creative people who worked with Jobs, a prime technological opportunity (new technical devices and abilities culminating in the personal computer), and chance.
Of several companies in competition, if you somehow were able to erase anything but superficial differences, one of them would still come out on top, because of a snowball effect in which people decide en masse that they prefer A to B for no particular reason.
>You're overlooking several factors -- the influence of very creative people who worked with Jobs, a prime technological opportunity (new technical devices and abilities culminating in the personal computer), and chance.
I don't say he created OS X or the iPod, etc. Neither in their technical details, nor even in their high level UI (although he had some influence in that too)().
Just that he created a very specific climate and culture were those things could be produced in the way they were, and steered towards specific approaches to product lines, pricing, etc that could make those products thrive.
Competitors with the same amount of assets (or even far more at the start), and tons of "very creative people" couldn't get something as coherent out, and seemed to miss the whole point time and again. Not with things that require luck or money or access to talent, but with things that require specific decisions.
Similarly, those "prime technological opportunities" were available for all who could see it, and "very creative people" were working in all companies too. It's not like Apple, NeXT, Apple-2-in-near-bankrupcy were even a particularly attractive employer (at least before the iPod's success).
>Of several companies in competition, if you somehow were able to erase anything but superficial differences, one of them would still come out on top, because of a snowball effect in which people decide en masse that they prefer A to B for no particular reason.*
Don't know, the IBM PC market for example had IBM, Dell, HP, Compaq, etc competing rather strongly for 2 decades or so (which are aeons in IT).
And I don't think most competitors to Apple products had just "superficial differences". Following the scene since the late nineties I see a repeated, generalized lack of a plan and understanding of the markets they tried to compete with Apple in.
(*) Also I don't doubt that he had sociopathic aspects, although I'm not his doctor and I didn't have to be around him, so I don't care about that. At least he didn't kill anyone, which is better that lots of people in my book. I'd call any banker or golden parachute type of manager a worse sociopath.
None of these things has anything to do with the parent commenter's claims, which are that Jobs was not very technically proficient, and a raging asshole.
Your appeal to his business success is a complete non-sequitur.
>Your appeal to his business success is a complete non-sequitur.
Sorry, but the parent wanted to downplay Jobs, not just in his technical profeciency but in general (hence the "visionary" label, which can mean "nothing at all" etc). So my reference to his business success was to counter-balance that. And it shows a kind of "10 x" Wolf type, which is what we're actually discussing, in business too. Hardly a non sequitur.
Second, if you're going down that road, the parents comments about how Jobs had "pathological narcissism" and about how he couldn't "stand him" are also non-sequiturs in a discussion about the Wolf type, and wether Jobs was one. How are his personal feelings towards Jobs revelant in this discusion?
The fact that you seem to revel with the "raging arsehole" accusation and dislike my "business success" comments, doesn't make the first any more relevant.
The parent actually has personal experience working with Steve Jobs, which isn't something a lot of people on this forum can say. That makes his views on the man much more interesting than yours or mine, whether or not you agree with him.
The 'Wolf' type we are discussing is basically a cartoon superhero outfit for aspiring engineers to wear. Lopp is adept at these kind of character sketches of fantasy nerd stereotypes (he doesn't play by anyone's rules, but he also works miracles!). The fact that no one in the thread seems to be able to agree quite what it means demonstrate what a nebulously defined concept it is.
I'd much rather sit and read some Steve Jobs stories from someone who was actually there.
>The fact that no one in the thread seems to be able to agree quite what it means demonstrate what a nebulously defined concept it is.
Isn't "agree to quite what it means" a nebulously defined concept itself?
Some disagreement you can kind in any topic, even the most objective and well established ones.
But more specifically, the Wolf base description is just what the original (T)FA says -- the variations in the comments are because people draw upon their own individual encounters with such types, which of course differ in details.
He was probably the world's best incarnation of the "product manager" role. He conceived and designed (not necessarily visually or technically) most of apple's flagship products, including the Apple Store, which has the world's highest retail volume per square foot.
And I can easily see that role being a great place for a Wolf.
"Wolves" -- if you accept the concept -- are basically the anti-entrepreneur. We're talking about engineers who get head-down in deep problems, without the interest or ability to turn them into actual products. I learned the hard way that when a startup's key differentiator is "run by a brilliant engineer/scientist/mathematician," back away slowly.
Someone on this thread mentions Woz as a prototypical "wolf," which is probably right -- what made him work within the later Apple environment is that he could work on very focused, discrete projects such as the Disk ][. Compare with Burrell Smith, who was equally brilliant and equally idiosyncratic, but was able to function within the confines of the Mac development team (albeit with a certain degree of effort by management).
This sounds like something that would come with a job title of "internal consultant" or "<whatever> at large" or such, and be at the top of the technical career track.
I've worked with plenty of "good programmers" who absolutely need a structure and process in order to feel comfortable turning on their machines in the morning. Some people need to feel like they have approval to do anything, and would never suggest a new framework or toolset ever. Most would recoil in horror at someone doing anything different from the Process. I'd argue these developers can do really good work in certain teams, but they need some hand holding.
One of the other wolves was an experienced college professor who was brought in as a team lead, but who for all intents and purposes was an SVP in the organizational hierarchy. He was financially independent at a fairly young age and basically gave inspirational speeches and CS lectures instead of meetings. We were all freshmen to this guy, and he was light years ahead of our experience levels.
I liked these wolves, if that's what they were--they gave me hope that somewhere an executive was really freaked out about making the right call at a critical time.