201–210 of 514 posts
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You’ve never wasted a few minutes on whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker?
> whether a ticket was “critical” or merely “high?” or truly a blocker Wait until they start adding additional categories like critical blocker, high blocker, severe blocker, exceptionally severe blocker, etc. etc.
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.
The study you linked assumes the actors are not stupid.
> 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 that was an interesting read. I like the concept of a -10x engineer because they definitely exist (in my mind it is someone whose work moves you farther away from the project goals, rather than closer to them). But a lot of the bullets sounded like stuff bad managers do, not bad engineers. Off the top of my head these are the most common two "negative engineer" behaviors I have seen 1) Biggest one: an engineer w…
Unfortunately, this guy played management in a way that caused him to keep getting away with the behavior. Awful person to work with!
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.
I disagree. For me this outlines the caveats and pitfalls of software development and management. There is real truth to some of the authors points showing real paths that emerge naturally. If you're going to gaslight him by inferring anyone who is critical is an asshole, maybe you should ask yourself why you're taking the article so personally...
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Holy tamole. Had worked someplace for a short stint. There was a guy who'd started a couple months before I did. His work was 'revolutionary' and 'groundbreaking' - he'd been trying to build some sort of AOP-style PHP system - PHP4, mind you - without any extensions or internals work. It was just 'program this way' - undocumented patterns that encouraged copy/paste to half-way almost get you something usable (except,…
> "you know those sorts of geniuses that are so far ahead of everyone else that they can't even explain things, and no one else can quite understand it?" Richard Feynman was certainly a genius and he was well-known for his ability to explain complex topics in ways laypeople could grasp.
The "don't rock boats" is really what can slowly destroy companies. The -nx engineers know a lot of other -nx engineers that can come onboard until the stable boat just sinks.
This is something I've seen myself: Clueless manager hires the wrong man for the job -> wrong man is utterly clueless on how things work, what needs to be done, and flounders around for a couple of months -> wrong man decides that, hey, I know this one guy that seems to know his sh!t, let's get him onboard. Just fast-track him through the process.
Turns out the new guy is also wrong man for the job, and doesn't know what to do. So now they're two (wrong) guys doing busywork while the ship is sinking.
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If you can't see the negative bias in calling anyone a "-10x engineer", I just can't discuss the matter with you...
If it were directed at a particular person, sure. Otherwise, the author is describing negative traits and behaviors . Have you ever taken any management training? This is the quintessential way of discussing these sorts of things neutrally. Yes, you'd never want to call an individual a -10x engineer, but this is a random article on the internet. It's okay to be a bit headline-attention-grabby and stylistic so the art…
Yet, I also met an awful lot of terrific engineers who were brutally aggressive towards anything they felt was stupid. And in my opinion, those people cause at least just as many problems as people who perform really poorly.
I think the tone of the article (cynical, exagerating bad traits, etc.) promotes that kind of toxic culture, while not bringing much to the table in terms of fighting mediocrity. That is all.
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Super subjective. The most common thing I see is developers compensating for this by never writing original code and then demonizing others who do when they cannot read it. By original code I don’t mean config files or glue for frameworks.
Yep I've seen seniors/principals come in and steamroll people trying to do FP by claiming that it was inscrutable and irresponsible. Sometimes even going up the chain to cause shake-up without the team's input. Even though said FP was in production, working with a low bug rate, and the entire team was fine with it. And I've seen this happen at multiple companies. I've come to think it's the biggest existential risk t…
> 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 recently heard a quote that resonated with me: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together". I wonder if someone who treats these tasks as "non-work" is thinking of themselves as being more productive because they go faster than the folks around them, not considering that these other tasks that slow them down individually also help the team go farther in the long run...
The company I work for have quite a lot of all hands presentations with content relevant to like ... 5 people. While everyone else nods, sleeps, reads reddit, zooms out daydreaming. We have diagrams that have nothing to do with anything, but make manager feel like she is controlling something.
We do not spend much time on ticked management tho. Which an argument against that idea too - you can in fact have functional ticket management without everyone spending too much time on it. But, I did seen overly complicated systems in the past that required constant fiddling.
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You didn't say it outright, but it was exactly what I inferred from your comment as well. You said "toxic negativity" which comes across as a moral judgement, and anything that follows comes across as the result of that judgement.
It was a judgement. I do think the author is being a jerk here. But people can be critical without sounding like jerks.