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Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

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Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#201

Post by scarface74 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #187
scarface74 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology. Call me a proud member of the 1x engineer club. When I close my laptop at the end of the day or even when I’m having lunch with my coworkers, few people would know that I’m an “engineer” at all. The list of things that I care about more than technology in my non work life is a mile long. Technology is a means to an end - to…

This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work. To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ... [1]: exclude the special class of surgical PAs xD

Spoiler alert: most of the 2.7 million developers in the US aren’t “solving hard problems”. I interact with the people who are writing the services for the largest cloud provider. When I meet them for lunch, they are seldomly talking about work.

For awhile, I was working with the service teams involved with the various AI services trying to publish an open source demo around their services. When we left for lunch we were talking about travel, cars, our families, places to eat, etc.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#202

Post by 29athrowaway »

scarface74 wrote: post #201
maerF0x0 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work. To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ... [1]: exclude the special class of surgical PAs xD

Spoiler alert: most of the 2.7 million developers in the US aren’t “solving hard problems”. I interact with the people who are writing the services for the largest cloud provider. When I meet them for lunch, they are seldomly talking about work. For awhile, I was working with the service teams involved with the various AI services trying to publish an open source demo around their services. When we left for lunch we…

Most of the millions of plumbers in the US are not solving plumbing puzzles, they're ensuring that plumbing systems work.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#204

Post by scarface74 »

29athrowaway wrote: post #202
scarface74 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoiler alert: most of the 2.7 million developers in the US aren’t “solving hard problems”. I interact with the people who are writing the services for the largest cloud provider. When I meet them for lunch, they are seldomly talking about work. For awhile, I was working with the service teams involved with the various AI services trying to publish an open source demo around their services. When we left for lunch we…

Most of the millions of plumbers in the US are not solving plumbing puzzles, they're ensuring that plumbing systems work.

I bet the well adjusted ones don’t talk about plumbing in every sentence.

There is so much more to life than technology - this is coming from someone who did hobby programming in assembly language on four different processors by the time I graduated - in 1996.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#205

Post by acedTrex »

Olreich wrote: post #154
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 con…

I agree, configs in code are not a bad thing necessarily if they don't change often or at all. Sprawling config files are a significantly higher challenge to get your bearing with.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#206

Post by gorgoiler »

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…

That’s a great technical example. How many times have you encountered an engineer who wraps up their tool’s interface and exposes its functionality through a YAML config file when really it should have just been left as a programmatic interface?

The hubris of the engineer is in believing they’ve thought of everything anyone could ever want to do with their tool. Imagine if a shell only let you set your PATH via a static config file filled with strings. It’s probably fine 99% of the time but at some point someone somewhere is going to start programmatically building paths.yaml. Yuck.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#207

Post by spookthesunset »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #187
scarface74 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 1x engineer talks about their car and weekend, the 10x engineer talks about technology. Call me a proud member of the 1x engineer club. When I close my laptop at the end of the day or even when I’m having lunch with my coworkers, few people would know that I’m an “engineer” at all. The list of things that I care about more than technology in my non work life is a mile long. Technology is a means to an end - to…

This is fine for a certain class of work, and disastrous when applied to another class of work. To use an analogy a physician's assistant[1] doing brain surgery could be a big problem. if you need the latter. Also, you're probably overpaying if you hire the latter to administer Tylenol ... [1]: exclude the special class of surgical PAs xD

I sincerely doubt the 10x brain surgeon talks only about brain surgery in their downtime. I would assert that a true 10x person is smart enough to maintain good work-life balance.

There is an infinite pool work you can do. Smart, real 10x’ers understand what is a priority and are smart enough to pack their shit at the end of the day, go home and do nothing at all with their work.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#208

Post by spookthesunset »

29athrowaway wrote: post #200
tjr225 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you honestly find the pointless complicated code you write for whatever stupid pointless startup more interesting than cars I guess maybe I just think you’re a moron? Wasn’t that the point of my original post??? I bike and walk more than you do by the way. Actually come to think of it my van has appreciated! LOL!

Quoted post unavailable.

Because they are smart enough to realize they could make a shitload more money in their current occupation and treat their cycling as a hobby. Often times once you make your hobby turn into an job it no longer is fun. …maybe… never actually tested that theory personally so I don’t actually know if it is true.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#209

Post by ergocoder »

ble wrote: post #65
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…

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…

> Many people have been skeptical of the idea of the 10X engineer.

Why is 10x anything such a skeptical concept? We see it everywhere.

We see it in quality, impact, and effort.

Linus wrote git in days, and it was way better SVN.

Messi is probably 100x better in terms of stats and skills and 100000x better in terms of earning when comparing to an average soccer player

Apple's iPod is 10x better than Zune and makes 100000x more money.

A great entrepreneur is probably 10000x better (more impact more money) than a good one.

It is not strange that one engineer would be 10x of the other engineer in certain aspects.

Re: Staff Engineer Archetypes (2020)

#210

Post by therealdrag0 »

jackblemming wrote: post #176

Is there an archetype for programmer who does their damn job instead of bloviating at how elite they are because they read a few Martin Fowler or management books, or is it hard to spin that into a narrative worth high six figures?

I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about eliteness as much as role. If you can imagine a difference between a edge manager, a director, and a ceo, then you should be able to imagine differences between mid, senior, and staff engineers.

Having these distinctions help clarify exceptions from both consumers of the employees work and aspirers who want to do a certain type of role or not.

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