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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

101–110 of 514 posts

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It reminds me of some Python threading monstrosity a guy wrote at my first job. He said something like "this is my own take at async".

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#102

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?

If ticket priority does not matter, then why do you care? Set them all to single priority and don't think about it.

If priority does matter, then why "waste"? Lets say you get rid of tickets.. then your statement becomes:

"You've ever wasted a few minutes on whether a bug you found is worth mentioning in release notes? Or if it truly should cause revert of deployment?"

When said this way, doesn't seem like "waste" to me, rather a regular part of the job. If the person working the bug doesn't know how bad it is, then who does?

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#103

You forgot the most crucial part to making a career in big corps: After you fucked everything up "rescue" the project with witnesses.

And get promotion over guy that didn't pushed broken shit on production in the first place.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#104
I've seen the other side. 2/3rds of the devs I work with have no idea where the money in their paychecks comes from, and couldn't care less.

TLDR: customers don't pay for beautiful, elegant code dealing with the happy path only.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#105

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?

Whoever is responsible for backups but didn't set them up might be.

The person who wiped out the data should be thanked for uncovering the serious problem.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#106
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.

Did you find yourself on that list? Because besides this explanation, there is 0 toxicity.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#107
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?

No. I enjoyed the article and your sense of humor. Kudos

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#108
post #79
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 popu…

No but it is their job to understand it, otherwise you’re not contributing anything valuable, you’re stirring up drama. If I point to a light switch and call out it’s a problem that does you no good unless I tell you why, and why it’s like that in the first place.

The problem with the article is even though it’s right it makes no attempt to explain why, and blames bad people for the problems instead of understanding why they might be acting like they are.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#109
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?

I've been writing software for 20+ years. I think that article is pretty funny and on the nose. I'm currently in the midst of fixing an issue we just discovered added by a -1x engineer 17 months ago. He's the gift that keeps on giving.

If you're offended, this article is probably for you.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#110
post #85

> 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."

It really depends on if tickets are being written as an input to the work product, or as an agile mandated box ticking exercise.

Do you spend more time wrangling over the ticket content or the format? Do you spend more time discussing context & requirements, or story points? Etc

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