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Effective Engineer – Notes

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Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#191

Post by qznc »

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…

> takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!" and think to yourself "Actually, sounds like bullshit to me."

More of a personality thing. If you would pitch Dropbox or Facebook to me today, I would consider it bullshit just like back then. Nice little niche maybe but certainly no Unicorns. Who would put sensitive personal information into the cloud?! Obviously not much of a market.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#193

Post by dudul »

yanilkr wrote: post #147
yanilkr wrote: post #4

This is effective nonsense. Based on my personal experience, effective engineers I know do not follow a formula like this. This looks like a list of how to be teacher’s pet. A superficial need to be praised by others as effective only takes to “mediocre”.

I will try to elaborate without trying to insult anyone. It might be harsh but I am sure the author can handle it. First of all look at this sales copy of the book. https://www.effectiveengineer.com/book It looks like a weight loss e-book product designed to trick ambitious people into impulse buying. It tries to build credibility by name dropping "google", "facebook", "insert big company here" every other paragraph.…

You seem to be criticizing mostly how the book is marketed as opposed to its actual content. And I will agree with you, this page is awful, and it absolutely reads like the typical "get rich in 2 weeks" scam. But the content as described in this gist is interesting.

Do you disagree that effective engineers need to come up with strategies to be continuously learning? Or that it's important to make sure you spend time on tasks/projects that matter as opposed to busy-work? Or that it's important to properly use your daily tools? etc etc

I haven't read the book, and I only went over the main headers of this gist, but this all looks like pretty sensible advice to me to be more effective and productive.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#194

Post by dudul »

vinceguidry wrote: post #34

Does this violate copyright? It appears to be a clear derivative work. I ask because this is something I'd love to see more of, but I'd be afraid of doing myself because I don't want to get a C&D.

I don't think the original notes do, but there is this comment by the owner of the gist:

"FWIW: I didn't produce the content present here.

I've just copy-pasted it from somewhere over the Internet, but I cannot remember exactly the original source. I was also not able to find the author's name, so I cannot give him/her the proper credit."

How convenient? It was copy/pasted from somewhere, but oops, can't remember where or who wrote it, oh well, I'll just put it under my name :)

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#195

Post by gonzo41 »

daxfohl wrote: post #183
bsder wrote: post #76

> 80% of the impact comes from 20% of the work. This simply has no basis in reality nor research and it pains me to see it propagated. The old VLSI design koan is: "The first 90% of the project takes 90% of the schedule. The last 10% of the project also takes 90% of the schedule. 90% of the engineering occurs in the last 10% of the project."

I was going to say the same thing. The 80 20 thing should be reserved to the higher-ups and marketers deciding what to implement. At the development level, zero value is provided by any less than 100 percent of the work. Too many developers just focus on the 20 percent, leaving the project 4/5 unfinished.

Your assuming complete and correct requirements. 80 20 is great when you get fuzzy reqs and have to make a decision.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#196

Post by eej71 »

edmondlau wrote: post #175
ashwinaj wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Edmond, your book was great and I enjoyed reading it! I do have a question on your topic on high leverage work; as a startup how would you know what is high leverage work? You have talked about various tooling projects at Quora which turned out to be duds, but how would you know that beforehand without trying? I guess the same applies to your book...

Awesome, I'm happy you enjoyed it! In some sense, it might actually be easier to tell at a startup because what matters at a startup is growth. That can be growth of revenue (if you already have a product to sell) or growth of users (if you need traffic first to sell, e.g. Quora). The highest-leverage work would then be the things that most directly lead to that growth. Sometimes, this will require talking with produ…

Would be interesting to hear more about the projects that failed. How big of a rewrite was it? How long did it take before the group or a manager recognized that the project was failing? How did the group deal with the failure in the social sense?

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#197

Post by thundergolfer »

nine_k wrote: post #161
jyriand wrote: post #159

It's strange how obsessed software engineers are about methods of working. At a surface level it's just: sit down and write the code. But actually there are thousands of programming languages you can choose from; there are build tools, code standards, testing(to TDD or not to TDD) and mental models you have to wrap your head around before you even can start to consider yourself a decent programmer. It's fascinating,…

If it was simpler, it wont command such wages, and would be automated out sooner. Humans' current advantage is the ability to tackle complexity and uncertainty.

I think the comment you're replying to is implicitly making the point that some of the complexity is manufactured and needless.

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#198

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

I work on a team in which a few people adopted the strategy of doing 20% of the work for 80% of the impact. That leaves the rest of us doing the remaining 80%. If the people doing most of the work are not getting the credit for it, how is it going to play out in the long run?

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#199

Post by pjc50 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #156
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…

It's definitely a gamble. When the Apple Newton came up I thought pen computing would be the future, threw everything into it and was at the forefront for a few years. But by 2000 or earlier it was pretty clear that I had bet on the wrong horse. I guess my lesson is to jump ship sooner but then you also often hear that perseverance is the key. Tough equation. Now my belief is that you have to be persistent but also n…

The Apple Newton was clearly what happened when Jobs had the idea for the iPad 20 years before the technology could actually deliver a usable experience for it. And even then you can see sketches of it all the way back to the 60s: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CEc1OOGmA5IC&pg=PA91&lpg...

Re: Effective Engineer – Notes

#200

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> it takes a certain amount of chutzpah to hear about all these eminent people saying "This will be the next hot thing, you better get in now!"

Really? If you don't have that filter you'll be prey for every investment scam that comes along.

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