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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#31

Post by narag »

tetromino_ wrote: post #22

> To ensure developers are context-switching, recompilation should take at least 20 seconds. I'm now wondering what languages and projects the author has worked on if they expect compilation to take less than 20 seconds. Maybe small-ish golang projects? I don't remember the last time I worked on something interesting where recompilation was always under a minute...

Delphi used to compile 200k lines in less than ten seconds. That was around year 2000, with first generation Pentium. Later it slowed down a bit, but not so much.

IIRC, C family compilers suffer from some problem with headers that makes compile time much longer than it should.

Edit: oh, and that was rebuilding the whole program from scratch, including all libraries. A little change in the current file was les than one sec. Native code, in case you're wondering.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#32

Post by fedeb95 »

tetromino_ wrote: post #22

> To ensure developers are context-switching, recompilation should take at least 20 seconds. I'm now wondering what languages and projects the author has worked on if they expect compilation to take less than 20 seconds. Maybe small-ish golang projects? I don't remember the last time I worked on something interesting where recompilation was always under a minute...

the real problem is build time with the windows filesystem (in my case). switching to wsl2 you get under 20 sec. pretty easily, and most projects > 20 seconds are fixable (that is, if someone fixes it). Deploy time, on the other hand...

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#33

Post by flippinburgers »

tetromino_ wrote: post #22

> To ensure developers are context-switching, recompilation should take at least 20 seconds. I'm now wondering what languages and projects the author has worked on if they expect compilation to take less than 20 seconds. Maybe small-ish golang projects? I don't remember the last time I worked on something interesting where recompilation was always under a minute...

What is your measure of interesting? Of "medium" sized? Go probably compiles 15K lines/sec.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#34

Post by surprisetalk »

d--b wrote: post #21

A lot of toxic negativity in that post. Sure bad engineers exist, but you know what is even worse than the -10x engineer: the contagious jerk. https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/studies-being-a-jerk-is... Yep being an asshole spreads like a disease within organizations. Avoid these guys like the plague.

Author here.

I don't want to empower jerks.

Anything particular I should change? Or is the structure of the essay too cynical overall?

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#35

Post by dt3ft »

Mock everything until original code no longer executes (which was supposed to be tested): this one hits close to home. If everything is mocked, what are you testing really? Gah.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#39

Post by [deleted] »

d--b wrote: post #21

A lot of toxic negativity in that post. Sure bad engineers exist, but you know what is even worse than the -10x engineer: the contagious jerk. https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/studies-being-a-jerk-is... Yep being an asshole spreads like a disease within organizations. Avoid these guys like the plague.

[deleted]

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#40

Post by flumpcakes »

> Ask your team to perform tasks that resemble work. Common examples include presentations, diagrams, and ticket management.

I'm as salty as the next guy, but in my experience it has been the sub-par employees who are the ones that don't do this. Ticket management is not busy work, it's a necessity for everyone to keep updated. Presentations and diagrams are tools to communicate. I can safely say that by far the most waste I've ever seen has always come down to poor communication rather than anything actually business or technical related.

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