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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#301

Post by marcosdumay »

justin_oaks wrote: post #285
psychoslave wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 16 skip step 16. step 17 Recognize that questioning the status quo is a critical part of progress and growth, and that "toxic negativity" is often a label applied to dissenting voices to silence them. step 18 Acknowledge that engineering, like any other field, can benefit from improvements in productivity and efficiency. step 19 However, also acknowledge that a singular focus on productivity can lead to shortcut…

Ah, step 42. Well done. I was wondering why all these steps were generally GOOD things to do instead of the BAD things that all the previous steps were (1-15). And I was wondering why they all sounded the same.

They sound exactly like the stuff the people from step 14 write, while doing the exact opposite.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#302

Post by Viliam1234 »

svachalek wrote: post #148
safety1st wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are so common. The problem engineer will tend to be seen as a genius with inadequate help, the only one who can save us (from the pit he dug for us).

The "genius" who saves the company from the problems he created, is not the apex negative engineer. The time he spends fixing his own mistakes is the time he does not spend creating new ones. Sometimes his creativity will be limited to a single project.

There is also the type of "genius" who creates an overcomplicated framework as a foundation for a new project, and then leaves the implementation details to lesser minds trying to understand his work, while he moves to start another new project. He is always too busy working on a new project, doesn't have time to answer questions about the old ones. (The problem is sometimes solved by gradually removing his code. In extreme case, the library remains included, to avoid a political conflict, but the code is actually never called.)

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#303

Post by jameshart »

marcosdumay wrote: post #295
jameshart wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand developers’ complaints about this sort of thing and I am as much of a Jira-burnout victim as the next coder. But. How much time should a team be spending figuring out what the right thing to do is? Figuring out if the plan is still the right one? 15% honestly doesn’t sound like a number I would automatically assume is ‘too much’ for such activity. I’m not sure even 30% sounds like a crazy high number. Bu…

> How much time should a team be spending figuring out what the right thing to do is? Figuring out if the plan is still the right one? Keep in mind that in most "jira-oriented" places (or probably all of them), that task isn't attributed to developers at all. If you are doing this and development, like a healthy place, yes, 30% of the time evaluating your work sounds sane. But that evaluation time must not be interle…

Stipulated: many companies suck at engineering management.

But in companies that are good at engineering management, you will often find:

- weekly planning sessions

- daily standups

- work ticketing and backlog systems (sometimes Atlassian ones!)

- prioritization discussions

So I would suggest that anyone who assumes that those activities correlate with bad engineering management, is falling into a base rate fallacy.

P(is badly managed | Jira) is high, but that’s because P(is badly managed | tech company) is high.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#304

Post by DiscourseFan »

regularjack wrote: post #77
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.

I suppose the author of the article would, though.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#305

Post by patrakov »

The title contains an arithmetic error. What the article describes is a combination of 20 strategies (and explicitly advises to combine them!), each of which would have produced a -10x engineer. The result, therefore, is a -200x engineer.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#306

Post by withinboredom »

z3t4 wrote: post #300
aetherson wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rewrite from scratch everything that engineer X touched in four years of working here after he leaves" does not sound like a feasible approach to development. Also, while having good code separation between contractual APIs is a good goal and worth pushing towards, the idea that nobody would ever have shared ownership of any code unit between API contracts is too extreme.

You should not rewrite something that works, only when you need to make larger changes, even if the guy who wrote the program is still there you might want to rewrite from scratch if the requirements change, like you now need to handle 100x more traffic and need to have something with better performance, or scaled out.

SOLID principles at work. Closed for modification. If you’re modifying it, you’re not doing SOLID programming. /s

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#307

Post by mmcnl »

d--b wrote: post #146
BoneZone wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Am I saying that anyone who is critical is an asshole? Where? Seriously? I find that the article hides a deep aggressivity towards overall mediocrity behind a thin veil of office-space-like humour. And I think that aggressivity is contagious and so not a good thing to spread.

I agree. Be professional. Assume good intent and keep your opinions for yourself when nobody is asking for it.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#308

Post by quietthrow »

Does it bother anybody that he is promoting his own article by posting it? I have seen this and many other comments by this user as what seems like a funnel to book time with him and eventually be a paying customer. I am not sure how I feel about this.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#310

Post by jupp0r »

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…

You have never seen JIRA properly configured then.
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