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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#81

Post by robertlagrant »

strken wrote: post #69
flumpcakes wrote: post #40

> 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…

I suspect that the presentations and diagrams which need to be made, are made. Good communication is important, but the artefacts come about from the organic need to communicate an idea rather than orders from on high. Consider "The Bar team wants to know about our new Foo architecture" vs "The Bar team needs a 30 minute presentation on our new Foo architecture". Does the Bar team actually need a presentation, and co…

> I suspect that the presentations and diagrams which need to be made, are made.

I don't think that's true.

E.g. diagrams are made, once, because of an audit, instead of made iteratively as the software changes.

Or someone says, "If they want to know, they can just talk to me. You know, have a conversation?"

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#82

Post by weego »

sshine wrote: post #6
sublinear wrote: post #2

Got it. The -10x engineer is bad management who are in turn bad because the rest of the business is completely illiterate about anything even slightly technical.

> the rest of the business is completely illiterate about anything even slightly technical It is that moment of realization that you're entirely responsible for the fate of the company, and you either think "I better tread carefully" or "This should be rewritten in Rust."

"We need a new build system that's built on streams"

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#83

Post by Dowwie »

> Attract bright engineers and waste their potential. Undersell the difficulty of the project to management; oversell the project’s usefulness. Tell management it’s “almost complete” until they scrap it.

People at every level of the organization, from the top-down, have done this since forever. The -10x engineer will choose a language that they're fascinated by, but have no production experience with, and then spend most of the budget building libraries that they assumed already existed in the ecosystem. "Almost complete" becomes "almost ready to start".

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#84

Post by Izkata »

aidos wrote: post #56
belltaco wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Gulp, NPM, Yarn etc. running in the new build of UI stuff? Those take up a bunch of time.

I don't quite get your point. Your parent was pointing out that there are interesting projects where the "compile" time is milliseconds — at least for the developer perspective. It doesn't really matter that there's a step later in the pipeline at takes longer, so long as it's not in your way. Also, most of that could be cached away anyways.

Those are all earlier in the pipeline, required for the project to run, and gulp doesn't cache (or, didn't back when we used it), which IMO was the main reason webpack beat it so quickly.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#85

Post by apozem »

flumpcakes wrote: post #40

> 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…

Yeah, in my experience writing complete tickets forces people to actually think through designs and trade-offs. It also has the nice benefit of exposing their thinking to others in the organization, who can weigh in and go, "Oh, if you're doing that, we have to do this on our project."

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#86

Post by coldtea »

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.

>A lot of toxic negativity in that post.

Yeah, or as it's scientifically called: "realism"

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#87

Post by the_sleaze9 »

nickpeterson wrote: post #19
sshine wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the rest of the business is completely illiterate about anything even slightly technical It is that moment of realization that you're entirely responsible for the fate of the company, and you either think "I better tread carefully" or "This should be rewritten in Rust."

Rust may still be a bit too pragmatic, perhaps you could use a language you wrote yourself?

"Aaaand that's the container address orchestrator -- it's written in Haskell by that one guy a few years ago."

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#88

Post by javcasas »

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…

I recently pushed back on discussing if an already-completed ticket was really a bug, or a feature to work around a limitation in the browser.

I mean, that ticket was messing so hard the tech debt statistics! Or so that claimed the PM.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#89

Post by secfirstmd »

efitz wrote: post #64
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?

Software needs to be used by users. It’s unlikely your developers are so innately talented that everything a user wants to do is obvious and intuitive. So docs, etc matter. Other teams like marketing need to make schedules because they spend huge amounts of money doing things to make your product successful, that have nothing to do with code. For example, launch events, advertising, conferences, executive briefings f…

Well said. I work on engineering stuff but I spend a huge amount of time encouraging people to understand the other parts of the business and their needs.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#90

Post by robertlagrant »

ilyt wrote: post #78
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…

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

If you're making a change without saying what it is or how to test it, and not writing an automated test to cover it then that would be a problem. It might be 1 minute in code, but that doesn't mean it's a 1 minute fix.
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