From Each According To His Own Ability

There's a Marx (Karl, not Groucho) that goes "From each according to his own ability, to each according to his needs". It's perhaps typical of phrasing from the times that it's more bloated than it has to be (much like my own writing).

But basically, it seems to say that each person should do what they have ability to do. Fair enough.

Occasionally, I think of Google, and by Google, I could mean Microsoft or Yahoo. Anyone that has both search engines and email.

Here's the question I ponder. A company would like to hire the best (or many do) and yet getting the attention of the best (ah, attention economics) is difficult, just as finding the best is difficult. For all the talented people you may find, there are likely to be hundreds of thousands that may be nearly as talented. They may be buried in jobs that don't fully utilize that talent.

Of course, talent is only part of the picture. Working at a company also requires some interpersonal skills and some high level evaluation. How many senior management types would you imagine doing the actual grunt work needed to make a software product work? And yet, they have some skills too, whether it be ambition, or the clarity to decide what is important to work on and what is not.

Over time, I've begun to think that management is a necessary, well, evil. Management likes to pay itself a lot, for whatever reason, but mainly because it must make decisions to steer a company towards its goals, and part of that is identifying what the goals are, and how to achieve those goals.

Is there anything particular special about this talent? Well, it helps not to be wrong too often, but it seems people simply learn from experience as to what is right and wrong.

I know this isn't a well-focused entry, because the idea is muddled in my own head. All I can say is that often it's uncharted territory, and people do what they can to make progress. Smarter people, one hopes, can make better decisions.

But to get back to my previous thought, there is the idea that somewhere, there's a gold mine of talent, if one could only identify this talent, and that we're not particularly good at it.

For some areas, like sports, people have stats, people can look at plenty of TV coverage. If you want to know the best center, or the best quarterback, you have plenty of information in front of you. Sports commentators blah blah blah about it all the time. TO this, LT that, and so forth.

But nearly every other job has far less information for evaluation.

And what happens to the rest of us? If leagues like the NFL and NBA seek the best of the best, what happens to those who aren't good enough? They have to seek something else to do.

And what happens when you need the effort anyway, and yet, there isn't enough talent to go around?

It makes me wonder why top companies, the Googles and Microsofts of the world, aren't out there trying to figure out how to improve the baseline average of the talent the seek. Rather than find gold, how do you make gold? That's tougher to do, I imagine, and there's no guarantee of success.

And so does the information in email that are stored in servers begin to tap into finding talent or not?

I wonder.