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I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

benjiweber.co.uk

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Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#81

Post by Cthulhu_ »

gyulai wrote: post #77

> Let’s not build that feature. > Let’s not add this functionality. > Let’s not build that product yet. > Let’s not build/deploy that development tool. > Let’s not adopt this new technology. > Let’s not keep maintaining this feature. > Let’s not automate this. Working alongside (or even worse: under) an individual who sees it as his job to just say "no" to everything sounds like hell. It also reminds me a bit of the…

I mean it's a bit absolutist but that's to make a point; it's like the antithesis to Jim Carrey's Yes Man. A lot of developers are over-eager, simply looking for opportunities to work extra hours, pull an all-nighter, and show off to their peers. A lot of companies are over-eager to keep cramming features into their product, to keep pumping up those numbers, to build and release more and more services and products.

The nuanced point of view is of course in the middle; don't pick up more work or responsibilities without knowing the full story, without having done due diligence, homework, looking at alternatives, etc.

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#82

Post by Aleksdev »

namaria wrote: post #79
ArekDymalski wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> free incubator (...) freed from societies expectations of sweat, tears and busy work The fact that the most successful ideas&products weren't born in such places might cast a shadow on the attractiveness of this perspective. I think that without a challenege the mind is at risk of atrophy.

Einstein was a patent office clerk. Gregor Mendel was a monk. Sergei Brin had a scholarship. The myth that struggle breeds success is just a narrative intended to keep working class folks grinding.

You do realize Einstein was always studying? Sergei Brin worked like a maniac. Struggle breeds success. Not everyone successfully picks the right thing to struggle on.

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#83

Post by comfypotato »

littlestymaar wrote: post #74
enriquto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard about the entire concept of academia? It is more or less like that.

Maybe used to be like that (or maybe it's just prejudice against researchers), but from what I'm hearing it's pretty far from the truth today. Before you get a tenured position, you're basically stuck in the publish-or-perish rat race and when you eventually get a tenure, you now have an enormous responsibility towards the younger non-tenured reseachers of your department, who will eventually lose their job if the de…

It sounds like you’ve been heavily influenced by the tone regarding academia here on HN. It’s one of the nuances of HN that people “hate academia” here. (Admittedly CS has a strange relationship with academia in that the pay discrepancy is so outrageous between industry.)

Some people love academia. My PhD mentor is as happy as a pig in mud in his academic role. He only has to teach every other semester, and his course/lecture plans are solidified such that all he has to do is recite his notes beside slides and answer questions. He has to schlep to the classroom two days out of the week in these semesters, but his classes are back-to-back so that even those days are spent mostly where he likes. All of the rest of his time is spent happily “doing research” in a domain in which he’s a world expert. Publishing is a specialized sausage-production manufacturing domain, but if you enjoy the subject matter like he does (and I do) it can be a low-effort byproduct of effectively playing with code and ideas.

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#84

Post by abyssin »

cko wrote: post #75
abyssin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve met at least two developers living that life. One worked for a big German corporation. Sometimes he wouldn’t have any work to do for weeks. He got the authorization to work on a hospitality exchange network while in the office. Another one knew how to live on little money. He lived in squatted houses and was an adept dumpster diver. His lifestyle cost him one day of paid work per month. The rest of the time was…

Hey, do either of them have a blog? I'm interested in these lifestyles, especially the dumpster diving dude. My wife wouldn't let me squat or dumpster dive but I could always live vicariously through him.

He used to have a blog but no longer writes on it. There was quite an active community around Trashwiki but I haven’t had a look at it in a while. There’s also a dumpster diving subreddit, but it’s centered around finds rather than lifestyle.

I can relate to the vicariously living through reading part of your message, I love coming across people who share their alternative lifestyle!

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#85

Post by nicbou »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #61

My dream was always to be hired into obscure government bureaucracy and automate the data entry job away, while hiding it. After that, you basically exist in a free incubator. Imagine the software you can write, if freed from societies expectations of sweat, tears and busy work. Not to be rich, just to be technical excellent, productive and at peace. I wonder why this has not yet happened with open source. If a suffi…

That's roughly my current situation. My humble business does well enough to let me focus on what feels right. I haven't thought about the income-generating bits for a while now.

It's nice to do good work and not pollute it with the usual growth strategies, to tell advertisers to sod off, and to obsess over details of your choosing.

This completely changed how I work. If it's sunny outside, I'll forget about work and go ride my bike. But I'll also take a day during my vacation to implement an idea because it's just can't wait.

I don't know how other people work, but I found my perfect way of working. I've never been so productive before.

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#86

Post by Cthulhu_ »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #67
eloff wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you guys work on the same industry as me? There's easily a 10x difference between the best guy on the team and the worst guy who's about to be on the performance plan. It's a real thing. A lot of programmers really suck. I interview them and wonder why they're in this industry to begin with. I'm easily 10x those guys, they struggle with for loops. Then there are some superstars like Evan Wallace who created esbuil…

Is this real? I mean I work in Data Science and do quite a lot of programming but I'd assumed my abilities would be far below that of any Software Engineer. I can't believe anyone would get hired who couldn't do fizzbuzz etc.

Unfortunately, yes; there's a lot of companies - "enterprise" - that will hire a contractor which intends to make as much money as they can. They'll send a couple decent engineers, impress the client, they will ask for more, and they'll start filtering in more and more mediocre or outright bad developers, whose lacking skill is compensated for by the good ones.

But I'm 99% sure the enterprises are aware of this. They want the good developers, but realize they have to deal with bad ones too, and are willing to pay the cost and accept the risk it brings.

I mean outside of that it's fairly normal that a team will have a healthy mix of seniors (who do the meetings) and juniors (who do the work), but you'd still expect a baseline of quality and a technical interview there.

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#87

Post by gyulai »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81
gyulai wrote: post #77

> Let’s not build that feature. > Let’s not add this functionality. > Let’s not build that product yet. > Let’s not build/deploy that development tool. > Let’s not adopt this new technology. > Let’s not keep maintaining this feature. > Let’s not automate this. Working alongside (or even worse: under) an individual who sees it as his job to just say "no" to everything sounds like hell. It also reminds me a bit of the…

I mean it's a bit absolutist but that's to make a point; it's like the antithesis to Jim Carrey's Yes Man. A lot of developers are over-eager, simply looking for opportunities to work extra hours, pull an all-nighter, and show off to their peers. A lot of companies are over-eager to keep cramming features into their product, to keep pumping up those numbers, to build and release more and more services and products. T…

When I say "sounds like hell" I'm not necessarily looking at it from the point of view of what's economical, but rather from the point of view of job satisfaction.

Like: If a decision is made not to automate something, someone is going to have to do that boring repetitive work that could have been automated. The person making that decision not to automate is usually not the same person having to do that work. -- The former will usually be some kind of manager or owner, while the latter will usually be some kind of IC-level engineer or bookkeeper or something like that.

If a decision is made not to build that feature that a lot of customers requested, someone is going to have to explain to customers on a regular basis why they can't have their wish (usually some kind of sales person or customer service representative or something like that).

That's where the sadistic element of the Mordac character comes in.

There's a related problem that is discussed at length in the book "Peopleware" [1]: Often, from a strictly economical standpoint, you might be in a situation where you'd say "quality level x is the quality level that the market is willing to pay for, while any higher quality level is uneconomical". You might then be tempted to ask your employees to dial down the quality level of their work and produce worse work than they're capable of. -- The book argues that this is almost always a bad idea because of the demotivating effect. You'll get lower productivity and won't realize the cost-advantage you were hoping for in your purely economic analysis. Or to put it differently: Dialling up the quality-level in your product from the level you economically need/want to the level your employees are capable of will often pay for itself through increased productivity through increased motivation.

So, if you ask your employees to be 0.1x employees, you will truly get 0.1x employees. But the result won't be that you'll accomplish more with less, but rather that you'll do less and accomplish less due to lesser productivity.

[1] https://a.co/d/38NbxtG

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#88

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

Aleksdev wrote: post #82
namaria wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein was a patent office clerk. Gregor Mendel was a monk. Sergei Brin had a scholarship. The myth that struggle breeds success is just a narrative intended to keep working class folks grinding.

You do realize Einstein was always studying? Sergei Brin worked like a maniac. Struggle breeds success. Not everyone successfully picks the right thing to struggle on.

Struggle & synthetic stress prevents large scale strategy pivots though.

You need to be able to let the subconcious do its thing, for which it needs peace, quiet and freedom from stress. Difficult to do the step back otherwise.

The stress returns, when things then get traction, so i guess the truth is - alternation between stress free "creative" periods and stressy "realization" periods?

No idea what the optimal sinus is.

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#89

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

eloox wrote: post #78
qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #61

My dream was always to be hired into obscure government bureaucracy and automate the data entry job away, while hiding it. After that, you basically exist in a free incubator. Imagine the software you can write, if freed from societies expectations of sweat, tears and busy work. Not to be rich, just to be technical excellent, productive and at peace. I wonder why this has not yet happened with open source. If a suffi…

That's how I became a software developer. I was working for a big tech firm as a data entry "specialist". Everything (except some pricing calculations) was done manually. I was hired as the 7th member of the team. It started with copy/pasting some simple VBA scripts to automate small tasks. In a year I managed to automate most of the tasks. More notably: A monthly task that took 2 days(and quite prone to human errors…

You quit your series A? Why? You talked about your scripts?

Re: I strive to be a 0.1x Engineer (2016)

#90

Post by badpun »

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #61

My dream was always to be hired into obscure government bureaucracy and automate the data entry job away, while hiding it. After that, you basically exist in a free incubator. Imagine the software you can write, if freed from societies expectations of sweat, tears and busy work. Not to be rich, just to be technical excellent, productive and at peace. I wonder why this has not yet happened with open source. If a suffi…

> I wonder why this has not yet happened with open source. If a sufficient enough part of the public uses your software, the state offers you a maintainer role. Nothing big, but enough to life on and do work.

It didn't happen because people already do it for free, so why overpay?

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