Ours is requiring everyone to take security, Docker, and web development classes.
It's about 10 years late, but it's an improvement...
Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
91–100 of 152 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t mind calling myself a 10x engineer, but it’s of course better when others do so. ;) Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm. Seems to me it’s mostly about redistributing the fruits of common labors from those that focus on the craft and try to improve their productivity, towards the socially focused “humility experts”. I much prefer working with cocky 10x engineers rather than these humility poli…
The problem in my experience is that cocky attitudes have a tendency to spread and it creates a really difficult work environment. You also have to take the Dunning-Kruger effect into account, where most developers aren't able to evaluate themselves correctly. In our work we have a tendency to view thing as "right" and "wrong". I often find people with a few years of experience to be the worst. They have enough exper…
There's a difference between cocky and confident.
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#93You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't. If you have the work ethic, if you're disciplined, if you genuinely enjoy programming and the feature/software you work on - then you have the capacity to be better than engineers who enter this line of work purely and only for the money. That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be discip…
While I agree with all you said, I hold the belief that intelligence is mostly determined by birth (probably genes). So that may be a limiting factor even when your work ethic is high.
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Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#9410x engineers create themselves.
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#95I always thought the term "10x engineer" was only used in job ads. Nobody I know refers to themselves (or even thinks of themselves) as a "?x engineer", unless it's for marketing purposes in which case you might as well put 100x for good measure. The "best" engineer in the world would probably tell you that "the only thing that they know is that they know nothing". They may also say that the most valuable thing that…
The term doesn't come from people calling themselves 10x engineers. It was from a study that showed vast differences in performance across software engineers, up to 10x. The study has been criticized somewhat since then but I think the critics miss the point. Regardless if it is 2x or 10x, or somewhere in between, these differences do exist.
The study was of students, no one has a strong idea of how that actually correlates to professional work.
Myself personally, I don't think it does, not because some people aren't naturally better at programming than others, but because at some point the important decisions are unrelated to programming and are more about systemic decisions at a wholistic level.
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#96I've been called a 10xer before, and I'm the only one in my company currently at that level. We're a data company first and software second. Trainings don't work. What does work is pair programming but you have to do this effectively. Say you have 3 buckets, frontend, backend and infrastructure. Ideally, you want to pair someone who has very full infrastructure and backend buckets, with someone who has an overflowing…
You said a lot of things, many I agree and have experienced as well, but never answered OP. How do you create 10x engineers? Well you can’t. And you probably shouldn’t try. If you’re 10x somewhere it means you’re at a place with a significant (I.e. 10x) skills mismatch between people in the team. It’s not fun for anyone, the company and team become too dependent on you, and you skew any ability to project how long wo…
You're right in a way, but you're missing the "10x compared to what?". Consider the 1x baseline as being the median productivity of your development team (which is definitely hard to approximate, but for the sake of the exercise let's take 'value-added tickets per developer' [which excludes bugs/rework]). Then the goal is to do 10x on this median in a reasonable amount of time. Rince and repeat.
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#97You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't. If you have the work ethic, if you're disciplined, if you genuinely enjoy programming and the feature/software you work on - then you have the capacity to be better than engineers who enter this line of work purely and only for the money. That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be discip…
I can confidently say some sort of friendly but firm "work trainer" could 2-3x my performance.
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#98By having no pure managers. Everyone who is a manager actively makes independent contributions for a not-insignificant portion of their work-week. So, when we have 1-on-1s with them, we can actually discuss improvement avenues from the same vantage point. Not some spreadsheet pushing manager who has no clue how to measure engineer-productivity or performance. When they do code reviews, their comments serve as an impo…
This. I genuinely think this is one of the best comments in this thread!
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#99You can't "create" 10x engineer. You either have work ethic or you don't. If you have the work ethic, if you're disciplined, if you genuinely enjoy programming and the feature/software you work on - then you have the capacity to be better than engineers who enter this line of work purely and only for the money. That's what makes the difference. And no company can make you like the software you're making, to be discip…
As someone with ADHD, it’s kind of sad that I’ll hit some career ceiling because I can’t get myself to put in the work.
It's not as much about putting in the work, but it's about putting in the right work and at the right moment.
I've know some brilliant programmers with ADHD. They were perhaps not always the most active behind their computer, but when it mattered they got more work done than everybody else.
Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?
#100* Teaching me SQL * Providing us the training and paying for a cloud vendor certification * It’s a small company so team discusses all major tactical decisions * Providing me the opportunity to implement and document a new but super fast approach to architecture that I have developed over the past three years in a personal project * This is only the second time in my career that I am engaged all day (been in the corp…
It looks like your company is ticking a lot of boxes, they're a keeper for sure. Would you share their name?