Anyone have videos of someone programming fast or a video of a 10x engineer working or a comparison output of a 10x vs above average?
To actually answer your question, Jonathon Blow has some twitch streams of him debugging some problems: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/321734897 I don't know about 10x engineer (I actually think that whole line of thinking is bullshit), but Blow has shipped a few games.
There are definitely 10x engineers. They're just experienced enough not to make the mistakes a junior engineer makes. It's invisible, they just didn't do that stupid thing someone else would have done.
Have you ever had things where bad decisions caused lots of headache and cost a lot of time to fix? With a 10x engineer you have... fewer of those instances... maybe 10x fewer
>there's a whole industry evolved to make us unhappy—it's profitable for us to be unhappy because then we'll go buy “solutions” for our unhappiness. I like how it's a win-win now for me acting revolutionary by being happy.
Looks like his answer assumes that "before", people were happy. I don't think this was ever the case. More so, being unhappy might be itself an evolution tool.
Marketers want you to be dissatisfied with your current situation so they can sell you something you didn't really need.
It's quite hard to avoid even if you know what is going on.
oO you didn't like anyone there? Sounds like a problem with yourself. Can't imagine that you were sourrounded by assholes.
It didn't matter if they had an off-putting personality or were "OK." Either way, I just wasn't feeling it. On the other hand, the same happens wherever I go. Maybe Google's reputation of attracting certain personalities led me to believe there would be others that were similar or like-minded. Instead, they were mostly unhealthy judger types (though I'm not sure if the source is reliable, a few years ago 23.6% were s…
You seem to mention the Myers Briggs a lot in your posts... I’m not sure how useful it is.
The reduction of individuals to acronyms sounds to me like unhealthy judgment, so maybe Google did a better job than you realized in attracting “like minded” individuals!
> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess. This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession. Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who…
Bracing for down votes but I think that’s garbage. Once the system has been precisely defined in code (even poorly, especially when poorly!), refactoring it is a much smaller task, it’s also a ‘smooth’ problem (there are no hidden problem mountains that sap your drive as you discover your expectations were way off week after week) because the problem is all there in front of you, in ascii. You are also motivated to look good because people do mis-compare these non-comparable tasks. I’ve refactored my own code, I’ve refactored others’ code, I’ve had my own code refactored. Every refactoring iteration is almost always a lot faster than the last, and there is almost always a benefit in performance, though maybe only iteration #2 provides a really big boost when #1 was a rush job. You just need to be a good engineer who knows how to write well organized, well patterned, and performant code. It’s important to remember that engineering, like design in general, is an activity done under time constraint, every iteration is an opportunity for more time, and it’s also a fresh break/perspective on the problem. I love refactoring code.
His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it. My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to…
Some might be surprised at what are the most effective strategies in fifedom building and rising in a large org. It very often has much more about making deliberate choices to help those around you succeed, to actively recognize others and help others arond you sieze opportunities. And that kind of demonstrated leadership is what will propel your own rise in status within an organization. It’s a mistake, and will set…
Advancing at Google (as a Software Engineer) involved getting lucky. In order to be promoted in 2010, you needed to be responsible for a relevant part of a valuable project (in the eyes of executives and other Engineers) that succeeds . During many cycles, it was clear if a promotion or raise would be possible before work even began. As loyalty is rewarded, it also tended to be wiser to stick with one project/manager…
Yes, people are rewarded for being successful, and there is an element of luck in landing a good opportunity -- withing a company or at a different company. If you are on a bad project, move; don't expect to be rewarded for wasting your and everyone else's time and money. That's necessarily how it must be, or else everyone would get promoted for hiding out in a corner making beautiful useless things no one cares about, and there's be no money to pay for those promotions.
> I didn't have to work that hard, and one day I had this realization while sitting in my gray cubicle (I was in a sea of gray cubicles surrounded by gray walls, listening to white noise and all alone): I'm like, “Man I am so tired. I need to go home and take a nap.” I went home, but as soon as I got there I realized, “I'm not tired anymore.” Is there a name for this type of fatigue (or perception thereof)? I'm curio…
>I don't think it's merely boredom alone. Being bored / doing nothing at home doesn't feel the same way. At least for me, it's boredom combined with a lack of purpose. If you're doing something boring/mundane at home like doing the dishes, at least at the end of it you can see your sink is empty and the dishes are clean. It feels like there was some point to it. At many companies it can really feel like you are just…
I think the washing dishes analogy is a great. I've made a rule for myself that I won't take a job working on something I wouldn't personally care about or use myself, no matter how nice the pay/work culture/benefits are.
> “wow, these people [Yahoo] are idiots, and we're going to roll over them.” From then on, we just kept winning deals and squashing other companies. That was exciting." I wonder, what kind of deals were Google making at this point in time? What was their product? Sure, they had a web page that could search the internet, but how did they monitize on that? Did they offer custom site search solutions?
How is "squashing other companies" exciting, competing is given but squashing sounds beyond that
If you're a hyper competitive person, you probably will want to crush your competitors. And since competitiveness is a must to be CEO, makes sense that this is how the game is played
But you're not competing with those brilliant people on technical merit, but in the political game of building a fiefdom in a large company. That takes very different skills, and many people find it distastful.
That might be true for a small percentage of projects/teams. If you want to succeed as a SWE at a FAANG company you'll have to be an exceptional engineer, or have other skills (leadership, pm, ...). You can't just weasle up the ladder by playing "political games". Though, most of my colleagues don't even care about their career - most of us just want to work on cool projects which immediately affect billions of peopl…
You can weasel up the ladder by getting help but not giving help, taking credit for other people's work, and mortgaging other people's future to get your product launched today.