The Cost of Competition

It stands to reason that highly productive developers will be highly competitive individuals. Having a pretty awesome team here at VeraciTek has informed us about the dynamics of this competitive edge. Our CEO refers to our people as “elite” and I know of plenty of clients that would say the same. What’s our competitive edge? How have we avoided the depletion of productivity that is endemic in this field? Ryan Jameson shared this:

“There are almost as many different niches in technology as we’ve had clients. Many more actually. Some clients are striving for raw profitability. Others, are almost unabashed by inefficiencies due to their highly subsidized nature. My goal for our team is inspired and informed by my childhood as the son of a carpenter. ‘Honest work, honest return.’

The only competition I want to see among our team is work ethic. That sort of competitive spirit leads one of our gurus to run regularly, pushing themselves physically, and it shows when they tackle their projects. They’re focusing their efforts on solving it, not on trying to explain why they haven’t solved it.

Another of our peeps is consistently ‘early to rise’ and dives in from the west coast before most of the east coast has had their breakfast. That’s competitive, that’s an incredible edge, but in both examples it’s pushing oneself, to learn more, to get better. Masterful discipline gives masterful results. Pure work ethic. They earn their privileges.”

It becomes pretty obvious during that conversation that there is a form of competition that Mr. Jameson is not interested in. Excuses.

Excuses come in many forms and our CEO went on to explain that many of those forms are incredibly convincing, at one point stating: “When someone’s resumé looks great, and has 10, 15, even 20 years of ‘hands on’ programming, of course we want to talk. However, there’s a real threat there too. 20 years, that’s a lot of time to get good at the blame game. It’s a lot of time to get cynical, and unmotivated. Not many people are going to say: ‘I’ve been corporately brow beaten to the point that I completely check out, nod mindlessly, and smile convincingly while I can’t wait for the weekend to get here.’ At least not in an interview.”

This point reminded me of an unrelated call I made to report people dumping in a local park. I was put in touch with a federal parks person who sounded as though they just rolled out of bed at 10AM: “Hello, yes that sounds bad… Ok thanks for letting me know. What are we going to do? I’ve worked here for 40 years, I can assure you we aren’t going to do a thing.”

That sounds like an exaggeration, but they said exactly that. The fact is after all those years of “experience” the only real applied skill that person seems to have developed is a keen knowledge of exactly how little they can get away with.

At VeraciTek, we believe our model is better. We cherish accountability, because it showcases what we call our: “secret sauce.” Our CEO doesn’t mind sharing the ingredients because they aren’t trivial, nor widely available. They are a hardworking elite force with incredible integrity. There are no shortcuts here, it takes time and hard work to earn a team like this one. So, if you’d like to duplicate our ‘secret sauce’ Mr. Jameson is willing to publish it right here:

“Reasons and excuses look incredibly similar to the untrained eye. So you’ll need to be an expert technologist yourself to identify what’s going into your sauce. Excuses will ruin the sauce entirely.”

“There are many different tools that can be used to do the job, but choosing the tools only because your team is unfamiliar with better ones is like failing to wash your dishes between batches of secret sauce. What worked last year may not work this year.”

“Don’t be lazy! The very second you attempt to ride on your laurels you become an obstacle instead of a contributor. If you’re consistently disillusioned, cynical, or bored you’ll fail to perfect the sauce. This simply cannot be faked!”

“Pay better than anyone and trust your people. The saying goes: ‘ifs and buts… candy and nuts…’ IMO if I can’t trust you I shouldn’t have hired you. So work where you want, when you want, and how you want. This ingredient is the most rare of all, as a lot of skilled people have lost their motivation and nothing short of a miracle will bring it back.”

“Too many cooks spoil the sauce! No process can make up for integrity and talent. All of the above is ruined if the team is not ‘all of the above’, especially the CEO.”

That’s it. That’s the secret sauce recipe. If you have all of that you’ll have a good chance of succeeding. But here is one final caution:

“Have you ever heard the saying: ‘You get no credit for disaster avoided?’ Well it’s true, unfortunately. If you’ve reached a nearly prophetic degree of experience and foresight and navigate your client through a minefield of mistakes there will always be detractors at the other end claiming that all those decisions were unnecessary.

This is the kind of competition that is entirely unproductive. This is the sort of thing that some of those candidates were learning in all those years of ‘experience.’ They were learning how to discredit, make bold claims about how ‘they would do it differently’… it can be contagious. Great people don’t need to do this.

Developers themselves have the fruit of their own labor, which, while amazing, can rarely compete with Photoshopped fantasies projected via PowerPoint. Those detractors also consistently fail to produce, sometimes anything at all! They wittle away at their own promises until they’ve convinced their prey to trade in a Ferrari for a Yugo. Oddly enough, due to human nature, those that decided to take this course will defend it… Then the cycle starts over.”

So there you have it. Competition is valuable when it comes from highly motivated people who are pushing themselves to honestly improve everything they touch, consistently. That’s the job description here. That with a promise. So long as our elite team is doing exactly that, our leadership team will make their first priority to keep them yoked with like minded/hearted/spirited colleagues.