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Busting the 10x software engineer myth

swarmia.com

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Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#241

Post by mgkimsal »

com2kid wrote: post #229
y4mi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a senior engineer vs junior engineer experience level. The term 10x engineer is generally used differently. Though I guess the reason for terms like that might just be related to how many inexperienced people get senior level jobs.

> That sounds like a senior engineer vs junior engineer experience level. I've actually met junior 10x engineers, I could tell pretty quickly that they were better than me. I've also met senior 1/10x engineers! Working with a junior 10x engineer is humbling. I remember starting out at my first job, realizing I was working with people way better than me (my first office mate had 2 PhDs, IIRC Chemistry and Physics!), b…

> Thinking about it, I don't even know where I am on the 1-100x scale.

Where you are is dependent on the rest of the team, and the structure of the process. The notion of "X" times as a measurement implies a comparison to others. Posted elsewhere... I've been the slowest/least-productive on some teams, and I've been the 'rockstar/ninja/10x' on others - in one case, during the same time frame, just different teams.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#242

Post by eloisant »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #231
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…

> Marathon runners run 42 km in like two hours but it would take me days to finish the same distance... Not really. If you walk at an easy pace of 2 miles per hour, and start at 6am, you'll be done in time for an evening meal. At 3 mph, you might even make afternoon tea. The world record marathon times are, in fact, only about 4-6x what you can do as a walking human being.

Correct - and if you compare world record marathon runners with average (but seasoned) marathon runners, the difference is even smaller.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#243

Post by peoplefromibiza »

msla wrote: post #198
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Carmack could build a video games which is 100x across a number of metrics But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. Sometimes being 10x is only a matter of being free to help the best you can. EDIT: where Carmack shows that he is well above average is not in coding, but in being extremely pragmatic and thous being able to extract good, almost unbiased, information out of every discussion, even the m…

> But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. I honestly don't understand how this is relevant. Carmack is 10x in coding and designing software. Jobs was 10x in PR and persuasion.

The point is he wasn't when he worked with Jobs.

Carmack is exceptional, not just 10x, but how many above average people work with a Steve Jobs and can't prove it and do not even realize it?

Carmack is not an actual good benchmark here, but even as good as he is, he met his kryptonite

Don't assume that great workers will perform great in every condition, because that's not a realistic assumption and only puts pressure on younger people for no reason.

We must not support the idea that if you're not Carmack you can't be worth (at doing your job. *only *) more than the others or the company's average.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#244

Post by cyberpunkdyst »

eurasiantiger wrote: post #213
cyberpunkdyst wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. There definitely are people, who perform better than others, even when the environment is not built to favor them and hinder others from performing well. If we believe that the talent within a field follows the power law, as suggested by this study ( http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf ) it means that only 20% people in the field are high-perfomers, and something like less than 5% exceptionally h…

”The truly high-performing people, who are passionate about their craft are very likely to move to companies that are at the at the top of XYZ, where XYZ is the topic within software engineering that they're especially passionate about, pay well, etc.” Is there a source for this claim? How likely are they to move exactly, and what motivates the non-movers to stay?

This is based on my limited personal experience observing the careers of people I know, whom I could consider somehow exceptionally good at their craft. I co-led the CTO team of software consultancy with 350+ devs. In that role it was pretty clear that it was really hard to compete on salary and how interesting projects experts could be offered.

Motivations differ based on what the person values. The top motivations I've experienced are:

- Money

- Following intrinsic motivation and being able to grow professionally

- Friendships and the feeling of belonging

- Stability and not taking any risks

The people in the last two categories tend to change jobs more slowly in my experience, but most still do it at some point.

I'm not aware of any reliable studies on the subject from the field of software engineering. If someone knows one, I would be more than interested in reading one.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#245

Post by pjc50 »

com2kid wrote: post #229
y4mi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a senior engineer vs junior engineer experience level. The term 10x engineer is generally used differently. Though I guess the reason for terms like that might just be related to how many inexperienced people get senior level jobs.

> That sounds like a senior engineer vs junior engineer experience level. I've actually met junior 10x engineers, I could tell pretty quickly that they were better than me. I've also met senior 1/10x engineers! Working with a junior 10x engineer is humbling. I remember starting out at my first job, realizing I was working with people way better than me (my first office mate had 2 PhDs, IIRC Chemistry and Physics!), b…

I recommended a graduate hire once with "he failed all my questions, but he's clearly very smart". Fortunately I was right and he was great to work with, and I'd recognized that my questions had been expecting a particular curriculum.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#246

Post by pjc50 »

johntiger1 wrote: post #152
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…

Can a 10x marathon runner finish 26 miles in less than 1 hour? How about 10 minutes? There _are_ gaps between skill levels, but from personal experience, no one is substantially worse or better. We are after all just flesh and bone...

This is annoying semantics, but sport is just as often about being very fractionally better and making a time fractionally smaller .. at the expense of huge amounts of effort. The same can apply in software too. I don't think it invalidates the metaphor as long as you can stop people interpreting "10x" to mean "there is some precise metric on which we can determine the average is a number X and this person is at least 10X".

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#247

Post by Lichtso »

cheschire wrote: post #118
z3t4 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Schrodinger's project management: developers are measurable as long as they don't know they are being measured.

You might be joking but it actually has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Well, your idea is probably closer to the Marilyn Strathern definition.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#248

Post by jrm4 »

Pssh. As something of an outsider, its far worse than "10x." There's just a fundamental mismatch here, which I think is the elephant in the room. Where there are people like Linus Torvalds and Kovid Goyal, you just don't need that many software makers in the way we do it now, unlike the way you need at least X amount of construction workers or dentists.

Which, I believe, is not to say you can't have that many people working in IT, but a major shift of thinking is required. Software shouldn't be a product, and I'd go even further to say that it shouldn't even be a deeply centralized service. Rather, a lot of IT pros helping smaller individuals solve problems (and just happen to use software while doing it, in the way that e.g. astronomers happen to use math) would be best.

Re: Busting the 10x software engineer myth

#250

Post by Jensson »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #243
msla wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But even Carmack couldn't crack Steve Jobs stubbornness. I honestly don't understand how this is relevant. Carmack is 10x in coding and designing software. Jobs was 10x in PR and persuasion.

The point is he wasn't when he worked with Jobs. Carmack is exceptional, not just 10x, but how many above average people work with a Steve Jobs and can't prove it and do not even realize it? Carmack is not an actual good benchmark here, but even as good as he is, he met his kryptonite Don't assume that great workers will perform great in every condition, because that's not a realistic assumption and only puts pressur…

"worked with Jobs"

What are you talking about, John Carmack never worked directly with Steve Jobs? He had his own company and he sometimes had to talk with Apple as a platform vendor, but they never worked together on a title. He didn't like Jobs as a person but that is another story.

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