Forbes: Why Companies Lose Top Talent

Interesting article on Forbes titled "Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent". As a person whose changed jobs a number of times in my career, many of these items rang true. Here are the ones I identified most closely with:

1. Bureaucracy - it a shame when corporate politics and policies get in the way of delivering the best products we can to our customers. This drives me crazy!

3. No Performance Reviews - we crave feedback on our work. We want to know if we're doing a good job and how we can do an even better job.

4. Lack of Career Development - who wouldn't want to hear that they fit into the company's future plans?

7. Tolerating Mediocrity - there's a reason why the Yankees are "The Yankees". Everyone wants to work with the best and for the best. "A rising tide lifts all boats" but when members of a team aren't accountable for pulling their weight, it can really sink morale and productivity.

9. Lack of Open-Mindedness - to serve our customers better, we need the flexibility explore new ideas and ways of doing things. Having a team of people who do exactly the same thing and think the same way leads to stagnation and the inability to innovate.

I was happy to see this article and the good news is many of these items could be easily corrected.

Thoughts about a different StackOverflow reputation system

I love StackOverflow. It's my "go to" place when I run into a tough programming problem.

Reputation on StackOverflow can be a bit intimidating, however. Even when you have a few thousand reputation points (placing you in the top 20% of all StackOverflow users) - the top users have 100x that many points! It can make you feel pretty insignificant. "Catching up" to the leaders doesn't feel like a realistic option.

This week, I listened to a podcast about Cortes' conquest of the Aztec empire. During the conversation, the Aztecs were described as a civilization founded on war. Warriors were celebrated. They earned their own "reputation" - in the form of feathers and other ornaments - by conquering neighboring peoples. What I found most interesting, though, was once a warrior earned a badge for conquests on a particular village, they couldn't earn more rep by sacking the same towns again and again. This forced their warriors to become fighters with diverse skills and experiences as they fought new or stronger opponents.

I thought this example might provide a good alternative to the current StackOverflow reputation model where reputation point gains happen at a constant rate - regardless of the type of answers you provide.

Let's say that a user has gained 5K reputation points for answering Java questions. The top user reputation for questions with the Java tag has upwards of 20K reputation. Is the top user, really 4x more reputable as a Java expert? I wouldn't think so. It could be that the top rep user has just been a StackOverflow user longer. Or maybe they have had the good fortune to provide an answer to a question with a lot of views (and up votes).

I guess my point is, once you've gained a certain amount of reputation answering a particular class of questions, you could be considered an expert in that particular field of study. You've exhibited you know what you're talking about. What, really, does additional reputation provide past this point?

I know earning points is a large part of the appeal for many users so instead of turning off reputation gains outright after reaching a certain plateau, couldn't the rate of growth just slow down a bit? Instead of earning 10 rep points for all up votes, maybe the point rate would decrease by 1 for each 1000 points earned for answers with a particular tag, bottoming out at 1 point per up vote . I don't know - I'm just spit-balling here.

Another nice side effect of this change would be that users with a diverse set of skills, could still earn reputation quickly. Once they've hit the expert experience level for answering Java questions, for instance, they could still earn full reputation points for answering SQL questions, or AJAX. Users with a deep understanding in many, diverse topic areas would rise to the top. Like the Aztec warriors - to gain the most reputation - users would need to expand their skill sets outside of their comfort zone.

A few quick notes

It's been a quiet few months. I haven't worked on too many things I've felt like writing about.

That's not to say I haven't been busy. One thing I've been reading more about building great teams and delivering more to our customers. I'm just starting to read Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney. Obvious from the title, this book outlines the approach Disney teaches all of it's Cast Members (employees) on how to be great leaders and provide their visitors with great experiences. I've been wanting to read this for some time and I'll be sure to write more as I work my way through it.

Some related blog posts I've enjoyed recently are:

• The Duct Tape Programmer from Joel on Software where he reviews a chapter of the book Coders at Work. The post basically talks about doing the simplest thing possible to get something out the door and into people's hands. Amen to that!
• I've also been enjoying the "There is no magic, there is only awesome" series (part 1 & part 2 & part 3) over at the { buckblogs :here }. The series is about being passionate, opinionated, and continuously pushing yourself to be more complete. It's a good read.