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-> hallucinate your answers to the team mates, as if you are an LLM
How to be a -10x Engineer
421–430 of 514 posts
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#422Earlier 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.
In some domains and markets they're probably a genuine myth.
Remember, for every Bellard, Carmack or jart: there's at least 100,000 glue engineers who are just trying to cash in some easy VC checks - can't blame them at all.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> You've really never met this person? Nope. I've never met anyone who can complete in a month what it takes an average coder a year to complete. Neither have you.
In my time at Google, I saw numerous projects completed that a whole army of me could never complete (according to the required standards). There are many such problems where throwing more bodies at it won't help; genuine insight is necessary. I'm surprised you haven't encountered this.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#424A 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.
Step 11: Call out any attempt to make engineering more productive as toxic negativity.
He isn't saying that. Maybe you've never had the misfortune of working with someone who is just always negative but it is really draining. Those people aren't trying to make engineering more productive, because that would involve being positive and looking for solutions instead of just constantly complaining which is what they actually do.
Fortunately they're relatively rare in my experience. I've only worked with one or two.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#425> 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…
Yes. Disorganization is the largest cause I’ve seen of preventable waste.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone is different. The key is not forcing people into your own worldview. Some people do better with documentation or tickets or code or meetings. The point is that forcing people to do shit they don’t want to do will backfire and make teams unhappy and unproductive.
Everyone is different, but it doesn't matter that much. When you have a small team, you can often organize the work the way people prefer. Then you'll find that people who can be incredibly productive under ideal circumstances are actually quite common. But as the organization grows, you have to focus more on the process and the structure. Individual productivity doesn't matter if you can't channel that productivity…
Why does the organization need to grow?
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the problem our industry has is that these concepts are not well-defined. You can easily have engineer A strongly claim that the code that was put in front of them from engineer B is terribly designed and will be unmaintainable and then they write an alternative proposal that they love, and then the next guy C comes with the exact criticism of the alternative, and the twist is that C is actually B, the guy who wr…
I get what you're saying, but I don't good definitions are the problem. Whether an architecture is objectively excellent doesn't really matter. The question is whether the people who are going to maintain the thing can work well with it. A tribe of OO partisans will produce a very different system than a tribe of FP ones. Each could find their own system highly maintainable but find the others' incomprehensible enoug…
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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#428> 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…
But at what point does that communication cost more than just hiring somebody else who needs less hand holding and less "communication" to understand what is going on and figure out what to next. I say this because there always seems to be those who don't need this. And it's the ones who need this who never seem to produce as much or are able to solve the problems on their own. So I ask. If you could hire people who…
I think you are confusing communication and competence.
How do you even know what to work on without communication? Most real systems are used by real people who aren't the developers themselves. Product owners, business development, customer support, and a myriad of other people all usually sit outwith the developer teams. Are you talking directly to customers for feedback on feature development?
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean... yeah. That's kind of how a lot of big enterprise projects with VP-level visibility get managed (I participated in versions of this at both Amazon and Facebook) Obviously you don't need to pull all the junior eng offsite for a whole month, but the engineering leads + PMs + engineering management end up there. And obviously there's also ongoing prioritisation happening between leads/PM/management throughout t…
Yeah, I think this level of planning has gotten lost in our recent fad of agileness. Senior management thinks they know where they want to be in 3 years, but there is no cascading multi-quarter, let alone multi-year planning of the projects & steps to get there. I've even been in orgs where someone senior is trying to make very very large org & tech changes, and really can't be bothered to put the big building block…
Agileness is many things but I really think we can stop thinking of it as a ‘recent fad’ by now. The manifesto was written 22 years ago. It’s been the dominant mode of engineering organization for over a decade.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking the bare minimum of time to understand a problem before complaining about it isn’t toxic, it’s human decency that respects other people’s time. If I called out every problem with all the code I work with no one would ever get anything done, because everything is tradeoffs. I don’t think you’re saying that you couldn’t explain why the light not working is a problem. No one said you have to know how to fix it.
Except that, demanding that people have solution, which is what parent did and "taking the bare minimum of time to understand a problem" are two massively different standards. The original article definitely clears the "taking bare minimum time to understand a problem" standard. Neither parent nor you are content. > If I called out every problem with all the code I work with no one would ever get anything done, becau…
I never said the article should have solutions, or that the issues in the article are not problems, or that they shouldn’t be talked about. If you want to assign a point of view to me that I don’t believe then this is a pointless discussion.