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).
From a bit ago: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made. - https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-be... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893 125 comments; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32211953 30 comments) > “You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F**ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” > And so our resident…
How to be a -10x Engineer
431–440 of 514 posts
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Uugggghhh… “maintainable way” is again super subjective. It's not "super subjective" when something super niche like Haskell[1] is chosen. There are pragmatic reasons to choose a tech stack, the biggest of which is "can we find people to maintain it?". If you cannot, then it's unmaintainable. [1] That's the example that was chosen upthread.
You know there are entire companies using Haskell in production successfully and have been for years, right?
The number of companies using boring old Java, C#, C++ dwarfs your number by several orders of magnitude.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am that guy. Because you’ll leave and there will be no one brave enough to support and expand this code. And so it’ll get rewritten from the scratch. Why not write it in a maintainable way from the start. A significant part of choosing a technology is economics of people available to hire. Who can work with that technology 5 years later, when original authors will be long gone.
Isn't that kind of self-fulfilling? Only choose technologies that are popular for production stacks -> more people using those technologies professionally(implying less using others) -> only choose popular technologies -> etc. From a "making a quality product" standpoint it would make more sense to me to choose the technology intelligently according to the needs of the product. Anything less is just a business mythol…
> From a "making a quality product" standpoint it would make more sense to me to choose the technology intelligently according to the needs of the product. Anything less is just a business mythology about trying to deliver a lower quality product for a lower cost.
The "needs of product" should include "long term maintenance cost".
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#434[deleted]
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#435Earlier 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…
>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…
A 10x engineer is someone who helps ten people around them be twice as good.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Heh, I was once walked through a live “code review” where all my code that used Java steam maps were replaced by this one dude with for loops in private methods. What a dress-down… pff, the project was canned a few months after I left. But I’m a consultant, no long term investments
Man, I got a story not with Streams but with its C# cousin, LINQ. A long time ago I've seen a senior engineer totally lambasting a junior because the junior used a LINQ ORM.
He saw DB.Users.Where(a => a.Id == 1) on the screen and launched a tirade of "Are you retarded? You're downloading the whole Users table when you do that!"
It was fun watching our boss explain how LINQ worked and seeing the shame in the engineer's face.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#437Earlier 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).
From a bit ago: We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made. - https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-be... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15474893 125 comments; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32211953 30 comments) > “You will never be able to understand any of what I’ve created. I am Albert F**ing Einstein and you are all monkeys scrabbling in the dirt.” > And so our resident…
Awesome. They fired him after he'd become burned out and snapped, but were perfectly happy to let him grind away day and night for years while the rest of the team was twiddling thumbs.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#438Earlier 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.
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.
I don't know... As you imply, there's a lot of mediocrity among those 100,000+ glue engineers trying to cash-in. Being 10x faster/better/whatever than the average of that is nowhere near as challenging as being 10x compared to the average kernel contributor or systems programmer. Which makes being Bellard and Carmack even more impressive.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#439Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
TempleOS anyone?
I don't know. It was really made over a long, long time by a person working at it virtually full-time, I bet much more than 40h/week. I remember Terry posting LoseThos (or whatever it was called at before that) it in the OsDev forums in the early 2000s, and he had already been working at it for quite a while. Plus, at least back then, it was more of a novelty toy-like OS-simulacrum than a real OS. There were much more impressive projects at the OsDev forums at the time, with people running real app, connecting to the internet and talking to 3d cards.
Re: How to be a -10x Engineer
#440Earlier 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…
>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…
Why do you assume 3 is an okay number but 10 isn't, it seems quite arbitrary.
At the end of the day it is 10x what, tasks closed (features, bugs, etc) at same or higher quality? Terrible metric but those people exist.
But you can also be a 50/100x engineer if the metric becomes value rather than tasks closed. E.g. convincing key stakeholders their project is a bad idea can save millions, years and companies.
There's plenty of such moments to make huge differences and they compound.