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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#451

Post by goblin89 »

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 the argument against rewriting to be like the DRY principle: an oft-misapplied rule of thumb causing much of the unwarranted complexity in software around us.

Truth is, the cost of “just rewrite it” is as large as your unit of software architecture. Prefer loosely coupled, cohesive small parts and rewriting to accommodate changed requirements becomes preferable to the alternatives that tack on complexity as landscape evolves.

The world and our model of it both evolve all the time; the current version is not a work of an idiot but a necessary step towards a better solution and a lesson.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#453

Post by xnx »

jiggawatts wrote: post #445
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…

> Close runner up: an engineer who writes code that is inscrutable and therefore unmaintainable The most spectacular example of this I've ever seen was a developer writing Java that only ever used single-character identifiers. As in the following style: class D { public A foo(B b, C c ) { D d = b.x( c ); return new A(d.f(1)); } } Now imagine this for several hundred thousand lines. Zero comments. Massive functions. Y…

Wow. He probably thought this was making the code more compact/efficient/faster.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#454

Post by midoridensha »

jerf wrote: post #79
s-j wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is good at making a point of what is bad and for the fun of it. However, it is not successful at compassionately explaining what one should strive to instead as there is no simple negation of the points being made.

It is not the responsibility of a person pointing out problems to also solve them. Granted, pointing out problems is generally much easier than solving them, and correspondingly less valuable. As I like to say, stand up, spin around, and point at something randomly. You're pointing at a problem of some sort. But that still does not incur a responsibility to someone pointing out a problem to also solve it. It's a popu…

If anyone actually had the solution to this problem, they'd probably be a billionaire with the most productive software company in the world, by a large margin. Solving this problem is basically the holy grail of software development. Personally, I'm not sure this problem can be solved, since it's a product of flaws in human psychology: fixing it would mean changing humans into something non-human, or just eliminating humans altogether and having AIs do these jobs.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#455

Post by jamesfinlayson »

watwut wrote: post #209
jrussino wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Unless of course, they are not helping the team at all. Unless they are busywork we go through without ever looking at again or using it practically. Unless they are made to avoid making decision and then to avoid it again. 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 diagra…

> We have diagrams that have nothing to do with anything, but make manager feel like she is controlling something.

Guh, I remember at a previous job, one of my managers would always dedicate a multiple minutes to pie charts of types of tests done at the end of each sprint - the business stakeholders and the developers at the retrospectives couldn't have cared less that 30% of testing effort was spent on smoke testing compared to 28% last sprint.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#456

Post by danaris »

ptx wrote: post #349
danaris wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if something is so complicated it can only be understood with a picture, it's too complicated Absolutes like this contribute significantly, depending on the perspective they're spoken from, to the anti-intellectualism in our society today, or to a culture of elitism. For the first, some things are complex, and that complexity is part of the real-life systems and structures they have to interface with or represent.…

It seems like a good rule of thumb though. Here's a diagram of the 11 different tools you need to study to create an installer with WiX, which takes literally thousands of lines of XML: https://documentation.help/WiX-Toolset/tools.html By contrast, WiX# provides a complete code sample that specifies a complete installer in less than 20 lines, with no diagram necessary: https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

You seem to be arguing that the existence of one bad diagram and one (related) good text explanation proves that, in general, needing a diagram is bad, and being able to explain something succinctly and clearly in text proves the merit of the thing being explained.

I...do not feel that this follows in any way, either as an absolute or as a rule of thumb.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#457

Post by edandersen »

xnx wrote: post #453
jiggawatts wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Close runner up: an engineer who writes code that is inscrutable and therefore unmaintainable The most spectacular example of this I've ever seen was a developer writing Java that only ever used single-character identifiers. As in the following style: class D { public A foo(B b, C c ) { D d = b.x( c ); return new A(d.f(1)); } } Now imagine this for several hundred thousand lines. Zero comments. Massive functions. Y…

Wow. He probably thought this was making the code more compact/efficient/faster.

No, it was job security. This happens all the time when incentives are not aligned. Some engineers even have private dictionaries to convert between the obfuscated code and the real definitions.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#458

Post by firatsarlar »

What is X -> baseline of this hype !_?

And is this a linear function ?

X does 10 things - what things ? - 2X does 20 thing ? --> linear ..

There is no 10X engineer, there is authentic, lover engineer for me .. Lets skip comparing us each other, in right place, right will, and a little love every dev is 10X.

Rest, never ending run, never ending desire, never ending darkness.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#460

Post by throwawaythekey »

celdon25 wrote: post #198
shultays wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contagious jerks are often results of working with -10x engineers. At some point you become as such, if you don't quit the company before that. There are "bad engineers" and then there are -10x engineers, it is a real problem if the company keeps such engineers You should try working with -10x engineers and see how your feedback is being ignored as tech debts are piling up, products are continue to under deliver…

This hits close to home, but unfortunately Occam’s Razor will get applied. It’s an unfortunate reality that engineers (not their managers) are responsible for knowing how to handle themselves in the worst of situations so they don’t become the scapegoat at the cost of their health and security. Trust me, I’ve been through this situation and have been burned out by the [apparent] low standards and [apparent] double st…

I'm going through this at the moment at a startup...

I thought I could count on the charismatic leader to save my bacon by only calling on them for help when when things are visibly on fire and my own minor charisma hasn't been enough. In the end the leader didn't show up and now I've got a HR complaint against me for following up consistently when the fire didn't get put out. The whole thing has been fairly stressful because I'm struggling to understand the particular social dynamics, my best guess is it's just power protecting power, but I am naive/delusional enough to want to believe there is more to it. Now I'm taking a month off from work to try and unwind a bit.

All of that was just a long way of saying that you never know when you'll need to call on your stress/conflict managing skills, so best to keep them sharp at all times. I thought my skills were already good, but that was quickly revealed as false when challenged by tougher opponents :).

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