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Busting the 10x software engineer myth

swarmia.com

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Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#91

Post by Uberphallus »

hawk_ wrote: post #6

> Wrote hard-to-understand procedural code to 5000-line files. Did not actively share knowledge with his peers. The author seems to mean prima donna, not a 10x engineer and then goes on to destroy that strawman. Actively sharing knowledge, mentoring etc... and code and architectural simplicity are a given for someone who's 10x productive. Most of the costs are in maintenance not the initial delivery and a 10xer's out…

Yeah, this reads like a straw man attack on a particular and not widely accepted view of what a 10x engineer is.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#92

Post by goto11 »

cies wrote: post #88
dijit wrote: post #3

I know "10x engineers" exist; some people are fakes and put forward things that look like they have high impact but are actually a bit shoddy. Some people like to be present and suck up. But some people really do just work hard, smart and have deep passion for what they're doing- and importantly: pride, which makes the quality of the content great too. Some of the best engineers I know "visit" bits of code or infrast…

If a brittle piece of JS (with high support cost due to runtime errors) is replaced with a piece of Elm, the runtime errors are gone. The one that made the decision to change it, and actually ported the code, easily wins the 10x badge when we consider the high support cost of that brittle piece of JS code in production. > institutional knowledge is lost. Exactly! Say a dev rewrote the brittle piece of JS to resilient…

Someone who thinks all bugs will go away if the code is just rewritten in the hipster niche language de-jour, is probably a 0.1x developer. They may work hard but don't solve any real problems for the business and leave a mess to future maintainers who have to spend time debugging the forgotten hipster languages of yesteryear.

Do you think the developers who rewrote everything in Dart or CoffeeScript a few years ago were actual 10x productive for the business in the long run?

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#93

Post by [deleted] »

goldcd wrote: post #46
dijit wrote: post #3

I know "10x engineers" exist; some people are fakes and put forward things that look like they have high impact but are actually a bit shoddy. Some people like to be present and suck up. But some people really do just work hard, smart and have deep passion for what they're doing- and importantly: pride, which makes the quality of the content great too. Some of the best engineers I know "visit" bits of code or infrast…

I've worked with a few developers who are great - people who get bored of waiting so just build it themselves one evening whilst everybody's arguing over funding/recruiting the team we thought was needed. Within a team, I think 'greatness' comes in all manner of different forms, all of which are needed. The person who holds the whole software model in their head, and can rattle off the precise changes required to imp…

[deleted]

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#94

Post by yesimahuman »

karmakaze wrote: post #53

Anyone who doubts 10x devs exist either never met a real one or is merely protecting their ego. Software development is complex enough that I'd go so far as to say there's even 100x range even among those considered competent. We accept this range in sports and art, what's the hangup? It seems like someone who just learned deductive reasoning and feels like they could now understand the universe then someone says the…

Agreed. They absolutely exist and I think 10x is too small of a multiplier for what they can do for a project and team. In particular, starting a significant project from zero often requires them.

We’re fooling ourselves that they don’t exist and, if they do exist, are universally toxic.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#96

Post by riztaak »

Assign a work of an enginner to 10 engineers and it will become a work of 10 engineers. My experience is "10x engineers" are ones who work alone in independent manner, removing all dependencies that can potentially pin down their progress.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#97

Post by bjourne »

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at least 99 times out of 100 so must also be 10x in comparison. Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance...

It's true for almost any human activity that there is a huge gap between the worst, the average, and the best. It is preposterous to believe that the same wouldn't hold true for software development.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#98

Post by carnitine »

goto11 wrote: post #92
cies wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a brittle piece of JS (with high support cost due to runtime errors) is replaced with a piece of Elm, the runtime errors are gone. The one that made the decision to change it, and actually ported the code, easily wins the 10x badge when we consider the high support cost of that brittle piece of JS code in production. > institutional knowledge is lost. Exactly! Say a dev rewrote the brittle piece of JS to resilient…

Someone who thinks all bugs will go away if the code is just rewritten in the hipster niche language de-jour, is probably a 0.1x developer. They may work hard but don't solve any real problems for the business and leave a mess to future maintainers who have to spend time debugging the forgotten hipster languages of yesteryear. Do you think the developers who rewrote everything in Dart or CoffeeScript a few years ago…

They specifically said runtime errors. Elm is designed in such a way that runtime errors do not occur. Obviously logic errors etc. are still possible.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#99

Post by z3t4 »

bjourne wrote: post #97

This article is pure clickbait written to sell in this stupid Swarmia startup. :) 10x developers exist just like 10x musicians, 10x marathon runners, or 10x chess players exist. It may take a world-class musician a week to write a masterful symphony but it would take me way longer. Perhaps I'd never produce anything great so that musician would be infinitely better at it than me. Great chess players beat amateurs at…

The problem is that you can't measure a developer. So you can't say someone is 10x faster or better. If you add a bench-mark like how many LOC is written per day, most will exceed at that benchmark, but the overall quality will go down.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#100

Post by strken »

karmakaze wrote: post #53

Anyone who doubts 10x devs exist either never met a real one or is merely protecting their ego. Software development is complex enough that I'd go so far as to say there's even 100x range even among those considered competent. We accept this range in sports and art, what's the hangup? It seems like someone who just learned deductive reasoning and feels like they could now understand the universe then someone says the…

I don't think anyone really doubts that some engineers will work an order of magnitude or more faster than others on a given task. They just think it's a misleading way to think about performance, which likely falls on a unimodal curve within your organisation, and likely differs by task.

How do you know you're looking at a 10x developer instead of a 2x, a 9x, an 11x, a 500x, a 0.2x, or a 0.5x? The premise gives the impression that you can neatly split engineers into two groups, which is wrong. Your 500x engineers are only going to perform that way on tasks they've done before, your 0.2x engineer might just have the flu or might be an intern on his first day, your 2x engineer who wrote a parser for that weird proprietary format last week could be 0.5x this week because she's working on ansible scripts, and in general it's impossible to settle on a constant integer factor of engineering ability that does any better than IQ.

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