61–70 of 152 posts
My current company tries but does it very poorly. I work for the so-called "software house". They keep on asking if I want to do a cloud cert yet they don't really provide any course materials nor allow me to take time off to focus on learning. This is a very common pattern for these certs and I've seen the same in other places as well; there's always someone who wants you to get that certificate but you're never rea…
I have been a part of training sessions in my previous organisations, but in my opinion, training will not create a 10x engineers. Why? Most of the training sessions I attended or used to happen in my organisation were on very general topics. All these topics can be easily learnt via any other medium like youtube. Instead, I have seen pair programming or code-reviews making better engineers. The organisation used to…
pair programming is definately the way to go. Even Software Legned Uncle Bob Martin is a strong advocate for it. Listen to what he said about it in this podcast - https://alphalist.com/podcast/58-uncle-bob-martin-the-clean-... (about 10-15 minutes in)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A smart 10x engineer would use his special power to do 1/10 the work everyone else does.
As a dumb 10x engineer, I once tried being on the job 1/10th the hours of my colleagues and I still ended up outproducing them by an order of magnitude. I failed to account for the fact that they waste a lot of time doing unrelated tasks, like meetings, leaving only a fraction of their day to get anything done.
After having looked for opportunities for a while, I suspect being independent/in a co-op, or at least in a very employee oriented/owned shop is required to take care of your own long term development.
That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be disciplined if you don't train yourself so and to genuinely like and enjoy what you produce. It'd be equivalent to brainwashing.
Becoming a 10x engineer is more about psychology than it is about IT skills. It is about doing the right thing in the right context, about communication and about planning. Put a 10x engineer in a new company where they use different languages and frameworks, and eventually he/she will become a 10x engineer again. So I don't see much benefit in training, what works much better is learning by example. Put junior engin…
Set the expectation right, treat people like adults, expect that the person you are paying and employing as an adult engineer is an adult engineer capable of solving their own problems, and they will figure out how what they need to do to meet expectations and acquire the knowledge they need, whether that be training, or just google, or just looking at existing code.
By having no pure managers. Everyone who is a manager actively makes independent contributions for a not-insignificant portion of their work-week. So, when we have 1-on-1s with them, we can actually discuss improvement avenues from the same vantage point. Not some spreadsheet pushing manager who has no clue how to measure engineer-productivity or performance. When they do code reviews, their comments serve as an impo…
My current company tries but does it very poorly. I work for the so-called "software house". They keep on asking if I want to do a cloud cert yet they don't really provide any course materials nor allow me to take time off to focus on learning. This is a very common pattern for these certs and I've seen the same in other places as well; there's always someone who wants you to get that certificate but you're never rea…
I strongly believe if you want to make it in this industry you have be self motivated to educate yourself and develop relationships with potential mentors. Nothing will come from your employer.
It's one of those things that is so rare that there is little in common across actual 10xers. To cherry pick any aspects of "common" 10xer backgrounds and try to apply these to "grow" a 10xer makes about as much sense, in the business domain, as finding out what Warren Buffet eats for breakfast and then doing the same expecting some kind of results-- or maybe wearing turtlenecks like Steve Jobs (people have tried).
It it far more realistic, I think, to simply strive-for and train-for valuable skills/capabilities, to seek out effective people around you and learn from them at a "ground-level" and solve problems collaboratively and thus learn their approaches, developing an intuition of how to proceed against challenges.