I do not see how this has any chance at scaling. Who sits at the root of the delegation tree? The CEO? And they are spending all their time doing things they do not know how to do (as your rule does not allow them to delegate those tasks, and presumably there are enough to take all their time)? That does not sound to me like how competent delegation should look like. And being able to do X vs being able to evaluate someone else doing X are of course related, but still quite different skills.
Pretty decent chance it doesn’t scale! I am not choosing the principles for Lightcone based on what I expect to scale to hundreds of people. Larger organizations probably need different principles.
That said, in my experience when I look into competent companies, this holds surprisingly true. The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly. Executives at their companies are also selected to be strong generalists capable of performing (to an acceptable standard) a large fraction of the work going on in the organization.
And they are spending all their time doing things they do not know how to do
I don’t know where you picked this up. In my experience getting to a point where you can perform a task at a basic level takes maybe a few days, and it’s rare that you need to add a whole modality of tasks to your domain of management. I do spend a lot of my time learning new skills and figuring out how to do things I’ve never done before, but it’s like 20% of my time, not more than that.
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn’t take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don’t know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
And those are three of the more complicated tasks that I am tracking as bigger holes in my skillset! Learning how to clean a room to hotel standards, or learning how to fix most issues with a broken toilet, or how to set up a podcast studio, or learn a new programming language, or put up a wall, are much simpler and can be learned in a few hours. Lightcone as an organization works on a very wide range of projects, and I’ve had no issues achieving basic competence at all the kinds of things we do. I don’t see any particular issue for why not at least my executives should not be able to do the same for things in their purview.
I’m not sure how a bet could be formulated, and it’s possible that the process of formulating it would show we aren’t in disagreement.
However, I wonder if you are looking at the successful outcomes without considering the unsuccessful outcomes?
A great engineering manager is likely great at engineering. However a great engineer is unlikely to be a great engineering manager—dealing with code all day is different to dealing with people all day. Of course, some can do both (and here you see a great engineering manager who is also a great engineer). My contention is that a minority of engineers (main focus is code) are suited to be engineering managers (main focus is people).
This is essentially the Peter principle. Peter is great at something, and keeps getting promoted until he reaches the level of mediocrity, where he stops getting promoted. Peter is clearly great at position n-1, but not great at position n.
I’ve seen this scale to 100 person companies, and I think it scales much further.
I would describe the problem as follows: to reliably hire people who are 90th percentile at a skill, you (or someone you trust) needs to be at least 75th percentile at that skill. To hire 99th percentile, you need to be at least 90th percentile. To avoid hiring total charlatans, you need to be 25th percentile. And so on.
25th percentile is a relatively small investment! 75th is more, but still often 1-2 weeks depending on the domain. It’s almost certainly worth it to make sure your team has at least one person you trust who’s 75th percentile at any task you repeatedly hire for, even if you’re hiring contractors. And if it’s a key competency for the company, it can be worth the work to get to 90th percentile so you can hire really outstanding people in that domain.
I think you’re right and I honestly think OP’s point is the exception not the rule. They’re thinking of when a sr eng can delegate to a jr eng or something. Engineering managers can’t always replicate their ICs’ work but the ICs’ work typically should be legible to them.
If I “delegate” a kitchen renovation, that’s just called hiring a contractor, and yeah it’s hard to do well, especially as your ability to evaluate their work goes down. But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
It’s really not hard to learn how to renovate a kitchen! I have done it. Of course, you won’t be able to learn how to do it all quickly or to a workman’s standard, but I had my contractor show me how to cut drywall, how installing cabinets works, how installing stoves works, how to run basic electrical lines, and how to evaluate the load on an electrical panel. The reports my general contractor was delegating to were also all mostly working on less than 30 hours of instruction for the specific tasks involved here (though they had more experience and were much faster at things like cutting precisely).
My guess is learning how to do this took like 20 hours? A small fraction of what a kitchen renovation took, and a huge boost to my ability to find good contractors.
This is the kind of mentality I don’t understand and want to avoid at Lightcone. Renovating a kitchen is not some magically complicated tasks. If you really had to figure out how to do it fully on your own you could probably just learn it using Youtube tutorials and first-principles reasoning in a month or two. Indeed, you will be able to directly watch the journeys of people who have done exactly that on Youtube, so you can even see what likely goes wrong and not make the same mistakes.
Of course, then don’t do it all on your own, but it’s really not that hard to get to a point where you could do it on your own, if slowly.
Ehh my experience trying to hang a picture says otherwise. I got a stud detector that just beeps when it feels like and still haven’t really figured out what material my walls are made of. Claude has it narrowed down to like 14 different possibilities. A kitchen reno is also a highly regulated task where I live https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/property-or-business-owner/renovating-kitchens-bathrooms.page not to mention additional HOA rules since you’re affecting people above you, below you, and next to you. Plus my building has an “ancient pipes” problem and during renos they require you to fix plumbing as you go. Electric work would probably intimidate me because you have to wait and see if your house doesn’t catch fire to find out if you did it right or not.
Conversely I just haven’t renovated it because all the problems you said with delegating still hold.
I did manage to caulk my bathroom, looks awful but less roaches now.
Seems like you missed the point of the post? Last 2 paragraphs
Knowing how to perform a task yourself at all is not the same as knowing how to perform it as well as the person you are delegating the task to. The goal is not to ensure that competence across every work-relevant dimension strictly declines as you go down the organizational hierarchy. You frequently will, and should, delegate to people who are 10x faster, or 10x better at a task than you are yourself.
But by knowing how to perform a task yourself, if slowly or more jankily than your delegees, you will maintain the ability to set realistic performance standards, jump in and keep pushing on the task if it becomes an organizational bottleneck, and audit systems and automations that are produced as part of working on the task. This will take you a bunch of time, and often feel like it detracts from more urgent priorities, but is worth the high cost.
I get that, really the concerning example is electrical. That’s a bad task to be confident about “knowing how to perform a task yourself at all” and the problem isn’t “slowly or jankily”, it’s safety.
OP sounds overconfident given the stakes in electrical and illegibility of whether you did it safely. If they really want to push back against me, the most concrete way to do that is to write a case study on how they did their own electrical. And why not? It puts a lot of teeth on their thesis if they can do it successfully, might teach me something, and they either win the debate or learn about a real possible error they should fix.
You really do have to make more than a single mistake to burn your house down if you’re building to modern codes. And there are ways to check your work—including paying a professional to tell you if you did it right, but also checking resistance w/ a multi-meter and looking for hot spots w/ a thermal camera if you’re really worried (the main latent fault that could start a fire and not get caught reliably by protective equipment + inspectors is poor quality connections or damaged wires, causing high resistance, and localized heating). There’s other mistakes you could make but they’re more visible.
I think you’re also underrating how much you get to spread out the cost of this sort of strategy if you’re consistently doing it and picking up skills and background knowledge. It’s a lot less daunting if you’re going in already understanding how to use (and having) common tools and a grasp of electricity and related basic science vs starting from scratch.
The way this looks to me is that if you’re applying this consistently in an organization, you don’t need to actually fully do all tasks that need doing. You need to be able to recurse 1 level (which if you actually do might involve going down a level… but you mostly don’t need to go down 1 level, going down 2 levels is much more rare, etc.).
To use your example: low-level tasks should not be bubbling up to CEO level. If a controversy about naming a variable bubbles up from a code review to a CEO of a company with 100k people—clearly there has been a failure on multiple levels in the middle (even if the CEO is not up to date on the style guide for the language). The CEO might make the call but more importantly they need to do something about the suborganization before it blows up.
But I’d like to know if this is how Lightcone sees scaling of this principle.
I do not see how this has any chance at scaling. Who sits at the root of the delegation tree? The CEO? And they are spending all their time doing things they do not know how to do (as your rule does not allow them to delegate those tasks, and presumably there are enough to take all their time)? That does not sound to me like how competent delegation should look like. And being able to do X vs being able to evaluate someone else doing X are of course related, but still quite different skills.
Pretty decent chance it doesn’t scale! I am not choosing the principles for Lightcone based on what I expect to scale to hundreds of people. Larger organizations probably need different principles.
That said, in my experience when I look into competent companies, this holds surprisingly true. The best executives are very strong generalists, and the best managers are chosen to be strong performers in the task that they are managing other people to do. Elon is widely known to be a strong engineer, as well as a strong designer, and spends much of his time arguing details of that kind of work with his reports. Mark Zuckerberg is known to do similarly. Executives at their companies are also selected to be strong generalists capable of performing (to an acceptable standard) a large fraction of the work going on in the organization.
I don’t know where you picked this up. In my experience getting to a point where you can perform a task at a basic level takes maybe a few days, and it’s rare that you need to add a whole modality of tasks to your domain of management. I do spend a lot of my time learning new skills and figuring out how to do things I’ve never done before, but it’s like 20% of my time, not more than that.
In my experience most people just suck at learning new things, and vastly overestimate the depth of expertise. It doesn’t take that long to learn how to do a thing. I have never written a song (without AI assistance) in my life, but I am sure I could learn within a week. I don’t know how to draw, but I know I could become adequate for any specific task I am trying to achieve within a week. I have never made a 3D prototype in CAD and then used a 3D printer to print it, but I am sure I could learn within a few days.
And those are three of the more complicated tasks that I am tracking as bigger holes in my skillset! Learning how to clean a room to hotel standards, or learning how to fix most issues with a broken toilet, or how to set up a podcast studio, or learn a new programming language, or put up a wall, are much simpler and can be learned in a few hours. Lightcone as an organization works on a very wide range of projects, and I’ve had no issues achieving basic competence at all the kinds of things we do. I don’t see any particular issue for why not at least my executives should not be able to do the same for things in their purview.
The opposite is true in most situations, for example a great salespeople will often make a bad sales manager. This is Very Common. Eg https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/micromanagers-in-the-making-why-salespeople-struggle-to-lead.
Doing the task and managing the people doing the task are separate skills, and the existence of one doesn’t imply the existence of the other.
I will take bets at high odds that there is a huge enormous correlation here. It also doesn’t align with advice from the sources I trust here.
I’m not sure how a bet could be formulated, and it’s possible that the process of formulating it would show we aren’t in disagreement.
However, I wonder if you are looking at the successful outcomes without considering the unsuccessful outcomes?
A great engineering manager is likely great at engineering. However a great engineer is unlikely to be a great engineering manager—dealing with code all day is different to dealing with people all day. Of course, some can do both (and here you see a great engineering manager who is also a great engineer). My contention is that a minority of engineers (main focus is code) are suited to be engineering managers (main focus is people).
This is essentially the Peter principle. Peter is great at something, and keeps getting promoted until he reaches the level of mediocrity, where he stops getting promoted. Peter is clearly great at position n-1, but not great at position n.
I’ve seen this scale to 100 person companies, and I think it scales much further.
I would describe the problem as follows: to reliably hire people who are 90th percentile at a skill, you (or someone you trust) needs to be at least 75th percentile at that skill. To hire 99th percentile, you need to be at least 90th percentile. To avoid hiring total charlatans, you need to be 25th percentile. And so on.
25th percentile is a relatively small investment! 75th is more, but still often 1-2 weeks depending on the domain. It’s almost certainly worth it to make sure your team has at least one person you trust who’s 75th percentile at any task you repeatedly hire for, even if you’re hiring contractors. And if it’s a key competency for the company, it can be worth the work to get to 90th percentile so you can hire really outstanding people in that domain.
I think you’re right and I honestly think OP’s point is the exception not the rule. They’re thinking of when a sr eng can delegate to a jr eng or something. Engineering managers can’t always replicate their ICs’ work but the ICs’ work typically should be legible to them.
If I “delegate” a kitchen renovation, that’s just called hiring a contractor, and yeah it’s hard to do well, especially as your ability to evaluate their work goes down. But still cheaper than learning to renovate a kitchen and doing it.
It’s really not hard to learn how to renovate a kitchen! I have done it. Of course, you won’t be able to learn how to do it all quickly or to a workman’s standard, but I had my contractor show me how to cut drywall, how installing cabinets works, how installing stoves works, how to run basic electrical lines, and how to evaluate the load on an electrical panel. The reports my general contractor was delegating to were also all mostly working on less than 30 hours of instruction for the specific tasks involved here (though they had more experience and were much faster at things like cutting precisely).
My guess is learning how to do this took like 20 hours? A small fraction of what a kitchen renovation took, and a huge boost to my ability to find good contractors.
This is the kind of mentality I don’t understand and want to avoid at Lightcone. Renovating a kitchen is not some magically complicated tasks. If you really had to figure out how to do it fully on your own you could probably just learn it using Youtube tutorials and first-principles reasoning in a month or two. Indeed, you will be able to directly watch the journeys of people who have done exactly that on Youtube, so you can even see what likely goes wrong and not make the same mistakes.
Of course, then don’t do it all on your own, but it’s really not that hard to get to a point where you could do it on your own, if slowly.
Ehh my experience trying to hang a picture says otherwise. I got a stud detector that just beeps when it feels like and still haven’t really figured out what material my walls are made of. Claude has it narrowed down to like 14 different possibilities. A kitchen reno is also a highly regulated task where I live https://www.nyc.gov/site/buildings/property-or-business-owner/renovating-kitchens-bathrooms.page not to mention additional HOA rules since you’re affecting people above you, below you, and next to you. Plus my building has an “ancient pipes” problem and during renos they require you to fix plumbing as you go. Electric work would probably intimidate me because you have to wait and see if your house doesn’t catch fire to find out if you did it right or not.
Conversely I just haven’t renovated it because all the problems you said with delegating still hold.
I did manage to caulk my bathroom, looks awful but less roaches now.
Seems like you missed the point of the post? Last 2 paragraphs
I get that, really the concerning example is electrical. That’s a bad task to be confident about “knowing how to perform a task yourself at all” and the problem isn’t “slowly or jankily”, it’s safety.
OP sounds overconfident given the stakes in electrical and illegibility of whether you did it safely. If they really want to push back against me, the most concrete way to do that is to write a case study on how they did their own electrical. And why not? It puts a lot of teeth on their thesis if they can do it successfully, might teach me something, and they either win the debate or learn about a real possible error they should fix.
You really do have to make more than a single mistake to burn your house down if you’re building to modern codes. And there are ways to check your work—including paying a professional to tell you if you did it right, but also checking resistance w/ a multi-meter and looking for hot spots w/ a thermal camera if you’re really worried (the main latent fault that could start a fire and not get caught reliably by protective equipment + inspectors is poor quality connections or damaged wires, causing high resistance, and localized heating). There’s other mistakes you could make but they’re more visible.
I think you’re also underrating how much you get to spread out the cost of this sort of strategy if you’re consistently doing it and picking up skills and background knowledge. It’s a lot less daunting if you’re going in already understanding how to use (and having) common tools and a grasp of electricity and related basic science vs starting from scratch.
I think I can see how this might scale.
The way this looks to me is that if you’re applying this consistently in an organization, you don’t need to actually fully do all tasks that need doing. You need to be able to recurse 1 level (which if you actually do might involve going down a level… but you mostly don’t need to go down 1 level, going down 2 levels is much more rare, etc.).
To use your example: low-level tasks should not be bubbling up to CEO level. If a controversy about naming a variable bubbles up from a code review to a CEO of a company with 100k people—clearly there has been a failure on multiple levels in the middle (even if the CEO is not up to date on the style guide for the language). The CEO might make the call but more importantly they need to do something about the suborganization before it blows up.
But I’d like to know if this is how Lightcone sees scaling of this principle.