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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#71

Post by hardware2win »

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...

C# compiler has like tens of milions lines of code and it compiles in a minute or two

So you either worked on the biggest codebases in the world

Or youre doing CPP :)

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#72

Post by nerdponx »

docandrew wrote: post #65
flumpcakes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I see... I just assumed people read tickets and did the work and updated the ticket? For example, I went through a dozen tickets this morning and 96% of my time was spent either writing updates or doing the work the tickets were talking about. 4% probably went to reading the ticket itself and placing it in the correct place after updates/work. That 4% means meetings later will flow faster, and I don't have to rem…

You’ve never wasted a few minutes on whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker?

I certainly have, but I have rarely regretted spending the time to prioritize my work before starting my work and/or discussing the same with my team. Like pretty much all work of all kinds, there is variance in how long it takes and how effective the outcome is per person-minute.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#73

Post by naillo »

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.

Step 11: Call out any attempt to make engineering more productive as toxic negativity.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#74

Post by mkl95 »

> Make undebuggable programs. Plaster layers of abstraction over everything. Write spaghetti code. Make everything sensitive to initial conditions. Avoid pure functions. Use dependencies liberally. Say “it works on my machine” whenever possible.

A lot of legacy software is like this. I wonder how many billions it costs the economy per year.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#75

Post by goodpoint »

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.

People here are irked because HN is the home of CV-driven development.

EDIT: ...as proven by the rain of downvotes...

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#76

Post by hermannj314 »

I got burned out and lost a few years of my life due to a job like this.

We had two things:

a. Poor systems and poor communication permeated the IT department

b. IT was viewed as a cost center so no amount of heroic intervention was ever rewarded proportionately to business impact. It was Sisyphean.

If you are in a situation like this, please run away. You can't win - either the free market will destroy your employer, or your employer will destroy you.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#77

Post by regularjack »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #68

A friend of mine accidentally wiped out over 100k hours of other researcher's computing operations the other day, does that make him a -100,000x engineer?

If that data would be wiped by a fire instead, would you call that fire a -100,000x a engineer?

Accidents happen, the fault lies on whoever did not backup the data.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#78

Post by ilyt »

flumpcakes wrote: post #60
michaelt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ticket management is not busy work, it's a necessity for everyone to keep updated. I would say that rather depends on how much of it you do.

Oh, I see... I just assumed people read tickets and did the work and updated the ticket? For example, I went through a dozen tickets this morning and 96% of my time was spent either writing updates or doing the work the tickets were talking about. 4% probably went to reading the ticket itself and placing it in the correct place after updates/work. That 4% means meetings later will flow faster, and I don't have to rem…

Make everything, even a 1 min fix a ticket and insist it's under right category and right project, the time is accounted for, and each developer have to report 8h time worked a day and you can have plenty of time wasted on ticketing

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#79

Post by jerf »

s-j wrote: post #53
surprisetalk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I don't want to empower jerks. Anything particular I should change? Or is the structure of the essay too cynical overall?

The article is good at making a point of what is bad and for the fun of it. However, it is not successful at compassionately explaining what one should strive to instead as there is no simple negation of the points being made.

It is not the responsibility of a person pointing out problems to also solve them.

Granted, pointing out problems is generally much easier than solving them, and correspondingly less valuable. As I like to say, stand up, spin around, and point at something randomly. You're pointing at a problem of some sort.

But that still does not incur a responsibility to someone pointing out a problem to also solve it. It's a popular idea for some reason but not one that can stand up to scrutiny of any kind.

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