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Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

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Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#151

Post by didip »

hayst4ck wrote: post #40

This is jaded and angry, but I think there is another archetype called "the politician." They play the game extremely well, providing poorly thought out solutions quickly to problems they haven't dug into the complexity of. They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format). Once they've picked the low hanging fr…

The politician is totally a thing at large FAANG companies!

It took a while for people to figure out their BS and when it's finally unearthed, two years has passed and they are ready to move on to another team or company and repeat the cycle.

Sometimes they even get a promo before their rube goldberg machinery is finished and someone else had to take the fall.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#153

Post by hintymad »

boppo1 wrote: post #149
hintymad wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many people have been skeptical of the idea of the 10X engineer. O Nah, of course 10x engineers exist. A 10X engineer saw that hundreds of engineers were writing MPI code to process data and struggled with error handling and therefore came up with a map-reduce framework and its underlying infra. The same infra also helped bootstrap a whole industry. In this case, we are talking about 10^6X engineer. Another 10X eng…

Were each of these really achievements by a single engineer, or a team? One guy wrote CUDA?

Ian Buck wrote the initial version, right? I'm sure multiple teams polished the aforementioned software. It's just that it was this one or two engineers came up with the idea, built the the first working version that the other fellow engineers thought impossible or too expensive or unworthy to build, and the rest was the history.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#154

Post by Olreich »

hayst4ck wrote: post #40

This is jaded and angry, but I think there is another archetype called "the politician." They play the game extremely well, providing poorly thought out solutions quickly to problems they haven't dug into the complexity of. They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format). Once they've picked the low hanging fr…

> They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format).

Specific to your example, rather than the sentiment, I think embedding config in code is highly valuable when you don't have a lengthy deployment cycle and have direct access to the source. It gives your compiler more information which can help prevent bad configurations (which are the cause of failures more often than anything else from what I've seen). Developers also have a better shot at feeling how badly configurable a particular component is when the configuration is code. It's much easier to hide the overly-configurable systems under a rug when the configuration is far away from implementation, in a DSL, in a different repository, or only visible at deployment.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#155

Post by Olreich »

29athrowaway wrote: post #142
bioemerl wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the workforce - the real answer is that the 1x engineers really really aren't operating at full capacity. You assume all parties give it their all. They rarely do. Get through college Do what you have to in other to get the job. Do what you have to in order to keep the job. 10x people do some very basic things. They care. They read about code. They have side projects. They improve their skills because doing so is…

More often than not, it's people that care about how to create abstractions that amplify their productivity. That is only possible if they can spend some time building abstract stuff that cannot be explained to non-technical stakeholders, which is not possible with sweatshop engineering methodologies like Scrum, or when you promote the smiling bozos that completed their 5 person-minutes Agile crash course to manageme…

Abstraction is not a panacea. It's often the root cause of significant technical debt. Abstracting as late as possible is often the best course of action, as it give you more information about how to abstract from the initial implementation.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#156

Post by spaetzleesser »

hayst4ck wrote: post #40

This is jaded and angry, but I think there is another archetype called "the politician." They play the game extremely well, providing poorly thought out solutions quickly to problems they haven't dug into the complexity of. They lay operational traps everywhere in their quest to get things done fast (like directly embedding config data in code to avoid fixing the config format). Once they've picked the low hanging fr…

This describes the “enterprise architects” at my company. They read a few white papers, make nice PowerPoints, send the work to some offshoring company. The systems produced either don’t work or have serious problems but in the meantime they have already moved into another project and leave cleaning up the mess to other people.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#157

Post by sbf501 »

tayo42 wrote: post #93
sbf501 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're being anecdotal: I think that claim is jaded and angry, and makes me wonder what kinds of companies people have worked at. Honestly, I've only encountered this once or twice, and I've been a career engineer since 1989 at places like IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Dozens of positions and groups, and I've never had to play politics. Maybe I've just worked at "good" companies (irony noted), but in my experience…

im actually amazed you never ran into politics at work. you never needed to navigate around egos to get what you want, you do every thing purely on merit, every decision is only technical? my whole career as been filled with stuff like people forcing their pet projects on the company, people hiring their friends and dealing with their in crowd

> you do every thing purely on merit, every decision is only technical?

Yeah, honestly. The vast majority of my hard decisions I made were based on schedule and resources: having to kill things or move people around. The only "political" anomaly I witnessed was that it seemed the employees at the Israel Design Center at Intel were getting promoted to principal at a much faster rate, and with much less years and experience, for what didn't seem like actual merit. But that didn't impact me other than some jealousy, because the line for principal promotion in my division(s) were very long with really really smart people. And I've seen many principals get shown the door for poor performance.

One possibility is that I never reached a level where politics mattered, or teams were small enough that it didn't have time to foment. And there certainly people who lived to become managers because they thought it was a status symbol, but I was happy for them to do the job.

Another could be that I'm just... well, daft. Both are possible. :)

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#159

Post by Olreich »

jedberg wrote: post #74
ble wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually think of an at-work "politician" as somehow taking advantage of relationships or social forces. What you describe sounds more to me like the ""10X engineer"" (with extra scare quotes for good measure). Many people have been skeptical of the idea of the 10X engineer. One take is that if your normal engineers are less than 1/10th as productive as another engineer and all of them are merely human beings, there…

I've seen 10x engineers. They do exist. However I've never seen them in isolation. It's more like teams of 10x engineers. I've seen teams of people who just get 10x more work done than equivalent teams elsewhere, usually because they consist of a bunch of amazing engineers and are enabled by management to get things done.

I think that's because a good amount of 1x engineers could be 10x engineers if given the right kinds of support. When leadership makes sure they have that support, they become 10x engineers. If you only ever see clusters of 10x engineers, it's more likely to be about the factors around them than the engineers themselves.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#160

Post by sbf501 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #119
sbf501 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're being anecdotal: I think that claim is jaded and angry, and makes me wonder what kinds of companies people have worked at. Honestly, I've only encountered this once or twice, and I've been a career engineer since 1989 at places like IBM, Intel, and Microsoft. Dozens of positions and groups, and I've never had to play politics. Maybe I've just worked at "good" companies (irony noted), but in my experience…

Intel was overran by MBA types until they got their most recent CEO, and it'll take years for them to undue that rot. If you worked in a software group at Intel after 2015 and didn't play politics, I straight up don't believe you.

I never worked for a software group at Intel. And I started there in 1989. I'm not out to convince a non-believer like yourself. Just sharing my experience.

EDIT: Intel certainly had a lot of dumb projects over the years, from POTS videoconferencing boxes in the 90's to its attempt at an iMac-like modular cloud server box. But that was largely paranoia pushing them to explore every possible corner.

But again, your experience is not my experience, and I'm not the one telling you that you are lying.

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