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Effective Engineer – Notes

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Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#131

Post by nostrademons »

brucephillips wrote: post #119
nostrademons wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference? When I look at some of the giant wins of the last major tech wave, often times the key factors in their success were external events that happened after the formation of the company. AirBnB benefitted massively from the housing bubble & financial crisis (3 years after formation), which created a large class of people who were desperate for income a…

> But without the benefit of hindsight, how do you tell the difference? See value missed by others. Do you have sources for any of the success factors you described? My understanding was that WhatsApp's success was largely due to focusing on feature phones, increasing ubiquity. Regardless, none of this changes the fact that OP is correct in saying that you shouldn't work on the wrong ideas, of course.

WhatsApp's push notification story is in the Wikipedia page, though I think I'd read it in a news story profiling Jan Koum after the acquisition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp#History

I was wrong about timing though: it was only about 6 months after WhatsApp was incorporated (2 years after they left Yahoo though, so they might have been working on it beforehand).

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#133

Post by IronKettle »

dwaltrip wrote: post #128
IronKettle wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard multiple similar arguments in favor of the word "synergy" or "paradigm". Let me turn the tables: Why is "leverage" acceptable to use but "synergy" engenders scoffing?

The terms themselves don't induce scoffing, it is the specific usage patterns over time, which then becomes associated with the term, devaluing it as a meaningful way to communicate. Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way by individuals who wished to appear in-the-know. Thus, it was devalued, as people actually in the know did not want to be mistaken for those those who didn't know how to use the term.…

> Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way

Again, I'm really not trying to put the author down here - but "leverage" is a term that can very easily and often is used in a mindless and vague way. Not always, of course, in the same way that "synergy" can absolutely be used properly.

Still, it would be extremely easy for me to mindlessly posit whatever I want as "high impact", or at the very least "minimal time investment". "Minimal" and "high impact" are inherently subjective phrases (minimal compared to what? high compared to what?) and without a baseline are effectively useless.

So, I guess I still don't see a huge difference between "synergy" and "leverage" in terms of vagueness. And if vagueness exists, mindless usage is pretty soon to follow.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#134

Post by edmondlau »

nostrademons wrote: post #130
edmondlau wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every person who rode a powerful technology wave, there are also many others who rode the wrong ones. One of my favorite stories from Drew was that when he first started Dropbox, he created a 4-minute demo video showcasing the product that functioned as an MVP for the product. The video drove hundreds of thousands of people to their site and grew their beta mailing list from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight. On t…

That's true and part of the challenge. It's not always clear what's a powerful technology wave and what's the wrong one. I've actually got a bit more of a personal connection to DropBox - Drew was active on HN before founding it, he posted it here before posting it on Digg [1], and he took me out to lunch right after they'd gotten their Sequoia seed round and asked if he could convince me to be employee #2. At the ti…

Wow, that is an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.

It really hammers home how hard it is to disentangle good & bad advice and how easy it is for an outsider looking into to really underestimate the depth of someone else's expertise in a given domain.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#135

Post by ringaroundthetx »

nostrademons wrote: post #106

"Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years." I feel like this is spoken by someone who hasn't seen more than one technology cycle come and go. What I've observed - having started my career back in the Java-will-eat-the-desktop days and then adapted through webapps, big data, mobile, and now AI - is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are t…

> is that the people who are best positioned to capitalize on an emerging technology wave are the ones who started working on it before anyone realized it was important, just because it was interesting to them

Its not just “interesting” there is also happenstance

There are going to be college kids working on “XEM Smart Contracts” for some ICO consultancy startup just because they had more java classes across semesters

And they will be heralded as pioneering geniuses just because some fortune 500 starts looking for the word smart contract on linkedin

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#136

Post by IronKettle »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #121
IronKettle wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know I certainly wasn't very well-equipped to handle tension or to have hard conversations about fair distribution of work. I guess my point is more that primary school really should've prepared you for this: Group dynamics and how to handle these "group tensions" is more of a basic learning skill that we should be developing very early on. I'm not arguing that this is a useless skill to teach, more that it's far…

Why can't the managers with business backgrounds be the social engineers expertly manipulating the asocial software engineers? I thought that's what they were for. Distribution of labor!

I think for me it's more like:

One of the fundamental duties of a middle manager is to worry about group dynamics, team effectiveness, group communication, etc.

If the engineers are now doing all of that as well, what's middle management doing?

("Nothing, same as always" is of course the snarky answer)

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#137

Post by swanson »

My most useful insight/takeaway from the book was about leverage and what activities you choose to do as you progress in your career: in six months you could ship 1x engineers worth of output (or maybe 2x or 3x if you are really great) -- or you could help hire and onboard 10 engineers and create 10x worth of output.

Thinking more strategically about the most effective way to spend my own time and energy was easily worth the nominal cost of the book.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#138

Post by dwaltrip »

IronKettle wrote: post #133
dwaltrip wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The terms themselves don't induce scoffing, it is the specific usage patterns over time, which then becomes associated with the term, devaluing it as a meaningful way to communicate. Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way by individuals who wished to appear in-the-know. Thus, it was devalued, as people actually in the know did not want to be mistaken for those those who didn't know how to use the term.…

> Synergy was frequently used in a mindless, vague way Again, I'm really not trying to put the author down here - but "leverage" is a term that can very easily and often is used in a mindless and vague way. Not always, of course, in the same way that "synergy" can absolutely be used properly. Still, it would be extremely easy for me to mindlessly posit whatever I want as "high impact", or at the very least "minimal t…

I agree "leverage" is further down the spectrum of being prone to meaningless usage (than most words), but I don't think it is as far as "synergy".

It's a more precise concept: put x in, get more than x out. The more you get out for each input of x, the greater the leverage.

Synergy is the idea of "greater than the sum of the parts", which is a useful concept but much more nebulous, in my view.

Not that this is a particularly important debate :)

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#139

Post by [deleted] »

brucephillips wrote: post #82
quadcore wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas." That is describing what it takes f…

What about this is specific to men?

[deleted]

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#140

Post by dualogy »

IronKettle wrote: post #111
dualogy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can see the author using the word "leverage" here repeatedly Or maybe devs/engineers are just growing more eloquent than used to be? "Leverage" is truly the most intrinsic essence of everything engineering/developing. Reducing man-days, eliminating manual efforts, extracting infinitely reusable abstractions, code that emits+evals code .. I could go on and on and on --- hard to find a more sufficiently terse umb…

I've heard multiple similar arguments in favor of the word "synergy" or "paradigm". Let me turn the tables: Why is "leverage" acceptable to use but "synergy" engenders scoffing?

I'll take that table-turn! Well my intuition here goes like so: think back to the first moment in life you heard about a "lever" --- then "synergy". Chances are, the former was an illuminating childhood moment when simple levering was first powerfully demonstrated to you by a peer or parent, and tickled your inner engineer/fixer-upper/tinkerer. Chances are, no comparable "engineerish" moment occurred when you first encountered the latter.
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