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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)

#101

Post by Attrecomet »

gyulai wrote: post #87
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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."

You did read the little sentences under the big bullet points, right? It's "first, let's see if it's smarter to not do the work at all, before we commit to automating", not "don't automate the boring stuff"

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

#102

Post by Attrecomet »

froddd wrote: post #66
trashtester wrote: post #64

> “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” 10x engineers are not 10x the average, they're 10x the median. And they probably know the difference. I would guess that 1-5% of engineers are 10x the median, while less than 0.1% or so are 10x the average.

Given the rather arbitrary nature of ‘10x’ I’m not sure this kind of precision is relevant here

Might as well try to keep score in Calvinball

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

#103

Post by trashtester »

im3w1l wrote: post #41
mattkrause wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fun comparison is that Usain Bolt, who literally wins gold medals, is not even a 10x runner: a tenth of his world-record speed 100m works out to a brisk walk.

A big part of being 10x is to use the right tool for the job. In this case a plane.

Or build the right tool for a job, for others to use. Imagine a world without tractors. The engineer that designs a tractor and builds a tractor factory would be a million-x farmer, while the farmers who buy the tractors become 10x farmers, until the others catch up.

Innovations and inventions, even in a very small and local context, may easily generate >10x more value than the output of a stereotypical "code monkey" who at best delivers according to a well written documentation.

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

#104

Post by gyulai »

Attrecomet wrote: post #101
gyulai wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"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." You did read the little sentences under the big bullet points, right? It's "first, let's see if it's smarter to not do the work at all, before we commit to automating", not "don't automate the boring stuff"

I did read that relativization, it just didn't pass through my bullshit filter.

This is because of a lifetime of managers telling me things like "before we do this thing that you want to do, please first conduct a fact-finding mission to consider the possibility that we don't actually need to do it". My mental bullshit filter turns that into just "no".

That's because the fact-finding thing only has two possible outcomes: I come back with evidence to support their no-position in which case: great job on that fact-finding. Or I come back with evidence to support my yes-position, in which case, guess what, there's something wrong with my fact-finding. Then they decide "no" based on their preconceived notion, plus they get to look very reasonable and evidence-driven. -- Conversely, a "yes" always looks very different. It's always "yes" from the start.

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

#105

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

badpun wrote: post #90
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?

Because softwares ability to change are a living thing and it becomes stagnant and brittle once its left with no humans to keep it alive in symbiosis?

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

#106

Post by trashtester »

xeromal wrote: post #34
eloff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's no leverage in running. There's a lot of leverage in software engineering. That's what allows such a wide diversity of productivity.

What is leverage? VIM?

A good editor (and the ability to use it efficiently) is a relatively small factor, comparable to the ability to type quickly.

Much greater leverage can be found in the ability to innovate, to have the undestanding needed to quickly select a good approach to solve some problem and the social skills needed to lead a team or company in a direction where they can (to re-use the term) leverage such new innovations in ways that generate maximum value.

For instance, if you have a team that uses RESTful java microservices on k8s for EVERYTHING, many compute heavy or IO heavy tasks may require massive clusters to run a data processing pipeline.

If you're the engineers that identifies this as inefficient, finds way to build the pipeline using a more suitable tech stack, and introduce this stack to your company, you could the infrastructure cost of a company by millions per year. That's kind of comparing the use of cargo ships to mules for transporting goods.

And if the tech you introduce also enable 10 other devs to develop 3x faster, this alone would make your effort as valuable as having at least 20 more such engineers. (20x).

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

#107

Post by goodcanadian »

comfypotato wrote: post #83
littlestymaar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cours…

It sounds like your PhD mentor is one of the lucky ones. My understanding is that academia used to be like that, but it is unusual to get away with such a light teaching load these days. Academics also tend to get loaded up with other bureaucratic "service" tasks that heavily take away from the available research time. Finally, getting the job in the first place is next to impossible (though that might start to change as the people who have been holding the positions for decades are literally starting to die).

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

#108

Post by fartsucker69 »

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.

Einstein was working in a patent office because he had trouble finding any work related to what he liked doing after his applications for various professorships at research universities failed.

A full time phycisist already tends to work a lot of overtime hours to get anything done, while already doing that as their main fulltime job activity, so with 100% certainty Einstein grinded like a madman in afterwork hours to do his actual research. This is also why he quit that patent office job as soon as he was able to.

Not to criticize your approach. genuine 0.1x programmers allow 10x (aka 1x) programmers to exist and get a lot of money doing a normal job.

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

#109

Post by ilyt »

ArekDymalski wrote: post #73
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…

> 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.

...because most people don't have that option in the first place. If 99% of population grinds away instead of having literal free lunch, of course most of the ideas will be from that.

> I think that without a challenege the mind is at risk of atrophy.

Not everyone needs external challenge of "afford rent". Some people are entirely fine with picking their own goal and striving for it, without their survival at stake.

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

#110

Post by enriquto »

goodcanadian wrote: post #107
comfypotato wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cours…

It sounds like your PhD mentor is one of the lucky ones. My understanding is that academia used to be like that, but it is unusual to get away with such a light teaching load these days. Academics also tend to get loaded up with other bureaucratic "service" tasks that heavily take away from the available research time. Finally, getting the job in the first place is next to impossible (though that might start to chang…

Fwiw, an entry-level tenured professor in France has to teach about 200 hours/year. This is a bit daunting the first year, but as you gain experience it's not that hard. Notice that this also includes hours for mentoring undergrad interns, masters students, etc. So if you are active in research, it's quite easy to cover nearly half of this teaching load for "free", thanks to students that want to work with you in your little projects. It's an awesome environment to be honest!
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