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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#351

Post by Herval_freire »

debatem1 wrote: post #348
Herval_freire wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah that was an interesting read. I like the concept of a -10x engineer because they definitely exist I don't believe 10x engineers actually exist. Maybe 1.5x, 2x, or 3x engineers exist at most. 10x is a huge exaggeration of human capability. Get this, say a project takes a year to complete. The concept is saying a 10x engineer can do this in about month. If such a person exists it will be so rare I estimate that m…

> Get this, say a project takes a year to complete. The concept is saying a 10x engineer can do this in about month. You've really never met this person? Feels like more or less everyone with real expertise should be able to do this in the right job.

Every competent and qualified engineer should be able to do the job of 10 competent and qualified engineers?

The statement that every engineer can be a 10x engineer is recursively paradoxical. If a 10x engineer existed, in my mind, he would immediately be able to identify this logical error.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#353

Post by convolvatron »

JohnFen wrote: post #313
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.

"Rewrite it" is almost always the wrong answer, although it can be an overpowering instinct. Personally, through decades of experience, I've learned that when this impulse hits me, I need to consciously remind myself of these truths: 1) The engineer(s) that wrote the offensive code were almost certainly not idiots. The code is probably that way for a reason, even if that reason isn't obvious to me. 2) If I embark on…

I find value in rewriting/refactoring it as a learning exercise. just take a quick pass. now you are in a really good position to talk about what the strengths and weaknesses are of the existing version.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#354

Post by robocat »

lispisok wrote: post #270

sigh . The 10x engineer has become tech's most toxic concepts and devs are its victims, yet we keep bringing it up constantly. Every time it's brought up it's a new variation that's either bad or good but always different than the original proposal of the BEST programmers are 10x more productive than the WORST developers from a paper in 1968. All that is come of it is devs arguing about a hypothetical programmer is a…

-10x Engineer: Prevent 1 +10x manager from getting hired.

Encourage doubt and confusion that one person can make a 10x difference. Jim Keller is a lizard. Great engineers are a myth. Play up to the worst cynical beliefs of management: all engineers are just wasteful bums on seats, then prove them right.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#355

Post by NortySpock »

baal80spam wrote: post #317
hermannj314 wrote: post #76

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…

> IT was viewed as a cost center Serious question: isn't it always?

Not if the people who develop valuable new product features are embedded directly in your IT department.

Basically, if IT + Product Development are in the same financial "bucket", IT can be viewed as directly supporting product development.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#356

Post by pcthrowaway »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #302
svachalek wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mi…

> In extreme case, the library remains included, to avoid a political conflict, but the code is actually never called

Ah yes, if the wrong people become aware that the code is never called, better to claim that it happened as too many people had their hand in the pot, and hey, the code is still working, and the tests are passing, so you didn't realize anything was wrong, rather than ruffle feathers and say you didn't want to touch the "genius" code because it was stuck up its own ass.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#357

Post by nonethewiser »

burnished wrote: post #204
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...

Gaslighting is a pretty serious accusation, its weird to see you use it so casually.

Very overused in online discussion. It requires intent which there is virtually never evidence of. Without that it might as well just be a difference in opinion. Its prevalence speaks to how intolerant people have become.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#359

Post by itronitron »

surprisetalk wrote: post #34
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.

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

You could have really shortened your list by just starting off with 'Use JIRA'

Also, the thing about wasting 10 weeks of wages on cloud computing was confusing because it mentioned buying exotic hardware and in my experience the options via cloud computing are never exotic, and never have a decent amount of RAM.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#360

Post by koboll »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #316
Dowwie wrote: post #83

> 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…

RDD (Resume Driven Development) The desire to add $TECHNOLOGY to run a relatively small site even though it will likely never scale beyond what a single postgres instance running on a mac mini can handle.

Unbelievably frustrating to be a junior or mid level engineer working with a senior dev who does this, watching it happen, maybe even arguing back and being overruled.
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