Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 152 posts

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#121

Post by zepolen »

zmxz wrote: post #65

You 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 distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.[32]

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord#:~....

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#122

Post by azangru »

jstx1 wrote: post #77
zmxz wrote: post #65

You 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.

Taylor Hunt, who says he has ADHD, has written a series of very in-depth posts about website performance, and how, after a lot of research, he created a super fast site demo while working at Kroger [0]. His example demonstrates that ADHD is no barrier to being a 10x developer

[0] -https://dev.to/tigt/making-the-worlds-fastest-website-and-ot...

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#123

Post by oneoff786 »

jstx1 wrote: post #77
zmxz wrote: post #65

You 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.

Being a 10x engineer has basically nothing to do with your career ceiling

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#124

Post by dpdpdp »

arvindamirtaa wrote: post #60

By 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 100%. Don't accept a manager position unless you get to continue being an engineer.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#125

Post by derwiki »

randomdata wrote: post #115
theshrike79 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some of us meetings are 90% of the job. I mostly integrate with other teams' services. Most of my time is talking with them (in "Meetings") about their API and reading through their documentation. Code is like 10% of my week, maybe 20-25% if I'm starting with a fresh service.

Mine too these days. Further proof of my dumbness. It's amusing that we can integrate with open source APIs without any trouble, even when there is often much more complexity involved, without ever talking to the person/people behind it, but as soon as its within a single organization it becomes a game to find pointless busy work to fill the hours.

It’s not pointless, look at all the cross functional work you can put on a few engineers’ perf reviews.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#126

Post by nonameiguess »

jstx1 wrote: post #77
zmxz wrote: post #65

You 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.

My wife has ADHD and does really well with the jobs she's had. I'd easily call her a 10x engineer in her field. I'm not sure how well you can translate this to an arbitrary job, but one thing that seems to help her is doing classified work. She still gets distracted, but she doesn't get distracted by Reddit and Hacker News, because they're not available on the network she's working on. She gets distracted by old documentation troves, reading more of her own product's code base, studying test cases, actually looking at the logs of all the overnight regression test failures that other developers ignore. Absorb all of that tribal knowledge that usually takes years or even decades to accumulate. (It's also a very old government program she's involved in, so tons of history and context to absorb.)

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#127

Post by singron »

paulcole wrote: post #59
ramblerman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It was from a study In case anybody is curious, here’s the study from 1968: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/481/readings/productivit...

I thought it was from Peopleware. They claimed they found the result by performing coding wargames among professional programmers in the 80s.

They claim that the best are 10x better than the worst but only 2.5x better than the median. Additionally programmers from the same organizations had very similar performance. I.e. there probably isn't a 10x difference in performance within your company.

The book claims similar distributions when you measure many kinds of human performance, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were many studies that replicated the general idea.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#128

Post by yourapostasy »

bjornsing wrote: post #46
zkirill wrote: post #28

I 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…

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…

> Honestly I’m quite tired of this false humility norm.

It is a matter of where you focus your humility.

Your accomplishments and deliveries? Absolutely market how they are 10X impacts than the norm. No need to label them "10X" of course. Point out their impacts, and the impact craters on problem spaces label themselves. And thereby you get labeled.

How much you rely upon everyone around you and they in turn rely upon you? Absolutely show humility here. These days, 10X impacts don't happen frequently until entire teams are coordinating together over long periods of time.

The knowledge tree in our industry is effectively infinite in all directions now. No matter how broad your reach, there are always more topics you haven't been exposed to. No matter how deep your "T" stem areas, there is always more depth to plumb even if you are at the cutting edge, for the fundamental limits of physics is the only true bottom of that trench.

Humility is absolutely essential when offering to help others and organically receive help from others to mutually cover everyone's gaps across this functionally infinite canvas of knowledge when taking down objectives together.

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#129

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

The "individual 10x engineer" who stands out among their peers is a bit of a myth. And a bit of a useless thing, the team's performance matters so much more than one individual on it - in fact it's possible to make the team less effective overall by e.g. raising 10x the usual rate of PRs and waiting for others to deal with them.

"great teams make great engineers", not vice versa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XppRCB99djw&list=PLuAItjWV4p...

Re: Ask HN: How is your company training you to become a better developer/engineer?

#130

Post by pipingdog »

I wish people would stop using the "10x" term, as it is meaningless. Nobody can articulate what x is or even what units x should be in. I won't even start--and nor should I need to--on "engineer."

The value of a person engaged in software development is highly context dependent. In the last year as an "engineer" in my previous role, I made a single code commit. A one line configuration change as part of an ops rotation. When I announced I was leaving, my supervisor (and his supervisor) was sad. They threw me a party with a customized cake. How was my contribution being measured? I wasn't managing people. I wasn't coding. But I had "built" multiple products.

Someone once asked me "how do you explain to your parents what it is you do at work?" I replied "I can't even explain it to my boss."

People regarded as 10x in one situation will enter another situation and appear to fail miserably.

Post reply on HN