131–140 of 144 posts
> 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…
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Unfortunately even the most prolific and very successful CEOs and management in our industry often fail to understand this. A couple years ago I was rejected from a 3rd round interview for a very large company that should have known better for the primary reason that my "coding challenge" exercise didn't meet an arbitrary lines of code minimum, despite meeting all of their requirements. And of course we have the rece…
> And of course we have the recent example of a certain chief Twit firing engineers based on LoC. Is there any evidence of this claim that isn't yellow press and random gossip on Twitter?
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Software folk taking the 10x thing seriously is akin to PC gamers unironically calling themselves the "PC master race". I have a hard time taking that conversation seriously.
The tragic thing is: Most of this industry takes the concept of the 10x, 100x developer very seriously. Just talk to a manager and slide that into the conversation, I bet 9 out of 10 will recite the gospel unironically. I am guessing these numbers aren't that better for software developers. Because all this can easily be mixed with job performance and effectiveness which are obviously real things.
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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.
He's ten times faster than my grandfather could go 100m.
Since the "10x engineer" is defined relative to other engineers, the right comparison is probably more like "other runners" than all people, which of course narrows that gap even more.
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/644554 summarizes some studies in Table 1.
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> When I said infinite is impossible, I meant in absolute terms, not relative to somebody else. The whole thread is about relative terms, including when I said infinite-x. And the context is clearly about certain worthwhile problems, nobody talks about a 10x engineer as someone able to make a trivial phone apps or web pages 10x faster than than average.
> The whole thread is about relative terms, including when I said infinite-x. Relative means numerator/denominator. My first reply was simply breaking that down into parts, aruing that the numerator could not be infinite, and that the denominator being zero is not a very interesting case. > nobody talks about a 10x engineer as someone able to make a trivial phone apps or web pages 10x faster than than average. Actual…
And what I was talking about are very complex or new problems, and here are absolutely infinite-x people. Things where the average engineer will create exactly zero value on over time. I don't know about Musk, but Linus is of course one of them. Task someone to write a scalable distributed version control system before 2005, and the average engineer will be incapable of doing that.
If you wanted to talk about something else entirely like working on simpler things, fine.
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The problem is that it's reductionist. A CTO's productivity on a side project could be enabled by good on-call engineers, a CEO and board who don't demand 80 hours a week of work, a home situation that's stable and supportive, or a lot of other things. Transfer Evan Wallace to a company that doesn't fit him, give him some really dumb KPIs, and his productivity would drop (briefly, until he quit). Fix the personal and…
You're building up a strawman and then knocking out down. Obviously people perform differently depending on what things they have to overcome, and people also have good and bad days. For the purposes of my argument, it didn't matter why differences exist, it just matters that there are differences.
You said that there's a 10x difference between the best and worst member of your team, in response to a post saying that the concept of 10x developers is hard to take seriously. I assumed this meant you thought calling the best member a 10x developer was a good idea, which is what I disagree with.
Are you saying that calling people 10x developers is not a good idea, but there's still a 10x or greater difference between the productivity of the highest performers and lowest performers within a single team when observed over a couple of years? I agree, but that argument's a very strange one in the context of the post it was responding to.
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What is leverage? VIM?
In this context, the ability to have an outsized impact in relation to your input. Think of a physical lever.
People obviously differ in abilities, but those differences are massively exaggerated by the environment. The best engineer at Twitter probably isn't getting much done this month. Conversely, a few people who were solidly average at their last job are probably rocking it because they've landed in a place where the work is a good match for their skills, the path forward is obvious and feels secure, and they're getting the needed support from their colleagues.
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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.
Now do an ultra-marathoner
A walk around Central Park is about 6 miles, for comparison. Throw in a museum or two and you're mostly there.
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.
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None of those things were products of their work environment. Einstein was able to always study and Sergei Brin was able to work like a maniac precisely because they were able to remove the restrictions of paid technical labour that drains your brain before you even get to the interesting stuff.
Exactly. Even if I want to do something in my own time that's similar to my work after hours, I have no personal energy to devote to that unless I'm rested or very desperate. It's rare that I actually boot up an IDE on my personal machine.