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1x Programming

tim.mcnamara.nz

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Re: 1x Programming

#181

Post by andrewf »

JimBlackwood wrote: post #45
angarg12 wrote: post #25

I praise 1x programmers, but for reasons that might go against the grain in HN. I'm from Spain so our working ethic is different from the Anglo-Saxon world. "Work to live, don't live to work" as the saying goes. My principles for a 1x programmer: * Work is a means to an end. A job should support the lifestyle you want to achieve, not be an end on itself. * 9-to-5 is a perfectly reasonable schedule. Fiercely protects…

I mostly agree with this list, I’d just like to add a caveat that working on a side-project can be a hobby! I have some DnD-related campaign ideas that won’t work in DnD, so I’m trying my hand at making them a pixelart game. Definitely a hobby and creative outlet! OTOH, I’m also trying to write a database implementation in modern C++. While fun, it also mostly serves as a “look me smart” for future job applications b…

In a similar vein:

> > * Prefers to spend time with their family or hobbies (e.g. train for that marathon) rather than working on a side project in Github.

Ha! I've encountered people whose lives revolved around running. They often fly to marathons on weekends. They'd spend mornings or evenings getting treatments from physical therapists, or cross-training with personal trainers. They spent lots of money and were in pain a lot of the time.

Nobody was forcing them to do this. They weren't ever going to run fast enough to become rich or famous. They did want to beat their previous times and/or run more marathons than last year. They enjoyed a sense of community with fellow runners.

Should these people receive corresponding advice about 1x marathoning? Maybe...

Re: 1x Programming

#182

Post by runald »

ravedave5 wrote: post #103
chrisweekly wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangent: apparently contra DeMarco and Lister, I'd argue that "the worst" are often outright detrimental to a team or project. Which in turn makes me question the "math".

I'll never forget having a negatively productive programmer on my team. If he spent an hour on a PR it would take 1.5+ hours of work to get the PR into shape to merge by other people because it took so much explaining for this guy. It was usually better to just scrap his code and start over. If code of his did slip through reviews often times there would be production defects that would then take more time to solve (…

I heard of a creature like that. I think they are called human being. Someone who was assigned to a team of highly efficient robots that never make mistakes and produces bug-free code. Production defects? Yeah, it's obviously that guy's fault alone. /s

If I didn't know any better, it sounds like you are just using the guy as someone to conveniently blame.

Re: 1x Programming

#183

Post by zmmmmm »

The problem with glorifying so called 10x programmers is that it acts as a rationale for all kinds of dysfunctional / toxic behavior, both from managers and employees.

Non-technical managers will accept mysteriously outweighed contributions from a staff member because they now believe it's entirely plausible that this person really is 10x as productive. When in fact they are creating piles of tech debt, grossly violating the archtictural norms, processes or other team-based aspects that everyone else is doing.

Engineers will see it as permission to cast aside solid, careful, thoughtful and consultative engineering process and just ram out code at a velocity nobody else can keep pace with. They may even use it to rationalize why they don't have to comply with processes the rest of the team is doing that slow them down.

Put together the managers and engineers both become enablers of unsustainable situation that, even if it works for a short while, is unhealthy and leads to lots of issues, whether they are technical, organizational or personal issues with staff (envy, exceptionalism, passive aggressive behavior etc etc).

Re: 1x Programming

#184

Post by __app_dev__ »

klipt wrote: post #130
jjav wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some will argue that one could never be a good developer following those principles. I'll argue those people need a reality check based on how things work in every other profession. My dentist is a great dentist but she works 8am-3pm and most decidedly does not spend an additional 8 hours slogging through leettooth exercises on topics barely realated to the practice of dentistry. My friend is a respected surgeon, b…

> My friend is a respected surgeon, but when he clocks out of the hospital he goes cycling and to the beach. But to become a surgeon, he probably had to put in ridiculous hours for years as a med student and then resident. Going through that gauntlet is what earned him the reasonable hours and good pay, by reducing his competition. Similarly the people doing leetcode are doing it to stand above the competition and ma…

FAANG Software Engineer pay is not that great when compared to a Surgeon (or many other good jobs) for people who have been doing other good jobs for decades.

How many Software Engineers do you who drive Ferraris? Probably not many, but for Surgeons, Sales People (at good companies) it's not a big deal.

No other industry would anyone tolerate being told to study 4-8 hours a day for months for a chance to pass an interview.

I realize I'm ranting but I've a Software Engineer with over 20 years experience and I've kind of lost interest being in an industry where the only thing that matters for an interview is how good I can cram leetcode, rather than what I've designed and built. Granted it would be hard for me to easily find something that pays more so I'm not quitting my day job (and now extra night job).

Re: 1x Programming

#185

Post by mirceal »

gernb wrote: post #162
mirceal wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the number of lines you write is almost irrelevant. People need to put the equal sign between lines of code written and productivity. Some of the most awesome and productive people I've worked with actually removed more code than they wrote. Code is a liability. There is no code like no code. Focus on the problem not the number of lines of code

I suppose it was my bad for using lines-of-code as a metric. What meant to convey is I feel like I've done the same amount of work in 10 days on hobby projects as 9 months on work projects. The difference to me is the hobby project is 100% my code and relatively small (25k lines total, 2k lines in last 10 days). Vs the work project which is 1000+ developers, no idea how many lines but at least 250k files. So, my poin…

yup. coding in a group setting is harder than coding on your own. Also productivity is whatever you want to make of it. Some people may feel really productive by tweaking a system to squeeze that extra 2% perf, some people may feel productive by writing code, some people may feel productive by enabling others. there is no silver bullet and putting things in perspective always helps :)

Re: 1x Programming

#186

Post by mirceal »

theamk wrote: post #179
mirceal wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this aligns with the hypothesis that some people have that a handful of people do most of the work (and the others are the "worst" performers"). What this misses, is that in any highly functioning teams everyone is important and in order for the "rockstar" to be the "rockstar" they need people to help keep the machines running and to support them. This is usually why a team that has a mix of both veterans and newbies…

If a "veteran" cannot do meaningful work without the newbs, either that "veteran" is not very good or your processes are too manual. The best programmers I worked with were not "rockstars", but "icebreakers" -- they would solve the hardest problems and leave the clear path for others. For example, they might solve a sporadic memory leak in a few hours, and thus save a less experienced team member at least a week of e…

yeah. talking about "rockstars" and "newbs" is probably not helpful. but... the veteran not only can do what the newbies are doing, they can do it better and faster. The point is that in having the newbs do that, the veteran's time is better used on harder / more open ended problems.

to use an analogy, if we are building a sewer line, the veteran knows how to dig as he's done it before and it represents no challenge to them. Not only that but they have better technique and stamina. Now, someone has to also decide where the line goes and organize the workers. So the veteran's time is best used figuring out where the line should go and coordinating, not digging, but his work is enabled by the people that do all the "actual" work

Re: 1x Programming

#187

Post by duxup »

torginus wrote: post #109
duxup wrote: post #12

Way back when I first saw the 10x engineer proclamations I actually thought they were … a joke. Like a meme or something. They described a lot of anti social and strait up toxic behavior and seemed to glorify it. It was absurd. It seemed like the kind of behavior that would all but ensure someone thinks they’re so much more productive than everyone else, and would prevent them from ever seeing that they aren’t. I was…

Unfortunately (or fortunately) there certainly are 10x engineers, and if they happen to be your coworkers, that's the most amazing thing in life. It's the difference between handing a task over to someone, and finding next day that it's done in amazing quality and finding they haven't made any progress at all. And in my experience, these people usually are not braggarts or have huge egos, they are just really good at…

> And in my experience, these people usually are not braggarts

That’s my experience as well. The real ultra productive devs are surprisingly easygoing. Nothing like the 10x memes.

Re: 1x Programming

#188

Post by rsanek »

addaon wrote: post #123
dsr_ wrote: post #28

In Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister write: Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1. Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer. Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1. What nearly everyone who has read that remembers is the following: The best people outperform the average by 10x. Spot a difference?

The problem with dealing with these concepts quantitatively rather than qualitatively is that the deeper you dig, the less sense this sort of statement makes. There's two ways to read your quote. If "the best people" are the best in an absolute sense -- say, the top ten in the profession -- then the chance that /your team/ will sample the long tail of these high performers depends on the size of the team, but is near…

I think we should assume the distribution is pretty non-normal. Feels to me like performance in many careers, especially so knowledge work, follows a power law. There's pretty good evidence for it: http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf

Re: 1x Programming

#189

Post by omnimus »

torginus wrote: post #113
raz32dust wrote: post #85

If by 10x, you mean engineers that add 10x more value compared to an average engineer in the team, then from working 10+ years in the industry, it is abundantly clear to me that 10x programmers exist, and a good team is likely to have 5-10% of those. However, these engineers are rare, and when you do find them, they are not perfect. They might have flaws in other areas - communication and teamwork is a common one. Mo…

The thing about communication skills, how eager would you be to communicate with others if you knew in the time it took you to explain the problem to someone else, them allocating time to do it, doing it, then reviewing the results, and fixing the issues, you could do it twice over? Some coworkers are like that unfortunately.

Person good at communicating would understand and navigate this situation and then figure out what to communicate for overall efficient solution.

Communication goes both ways. People who think they are so above that its easier to wave off others are more often than not missing different parts of the picture.

Re: 1x Programming

#190

Post by newaccount74 »

Two things:

- consistency is more important than speed. If you can keep at a project for 10 years you can achieve pretty amazing things even without being arockstar developer

- don't get complacent. Some people think they've seen it all and stop learning new things at a point. You don't need to learn every new framework, but you do need to put in some effort to stay on top of current best practices and technologies

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