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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#461

Post by amatecha »

JohnFen wrote: post #312
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…

> an engineer who writes code that is inscrutable and therefore unmaintainable (always by others, often by themselves as well). This is my biggest pet peeve of them all. I tell wet-behind-the-ears engineers "always strive to make the life of the next person to touch the code easier, even if only because the 'next person' will probably be you."

Yeah, I've had so many experiences of coming back to something I wrote 6-18mo ago, and being so relieved that I wrote it "simply" and with clear comments explaining the intent/purpose. Not only a great refresher, but anyone else could also gain context and easily make changes. I think there's also an aspect of that "broken windows" phenomenon[0] where inscrutable code existing in a project becomes a sort of implicit acceptance of more such inscrutable code being added to the project.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#462

Post by ornornor »

jiggawatts wrote: post #442

I'm nodding along to this list because I've been consulting with a large government department that has dozens of programmers with the effective output of maybe... two? Three at the most. They tick just about every item on that list. Staggering inefficiencies everywhere, duplicated work, duplicated codebases , etc, etc... The worst thing about these problems is that they compound , often exponentially or at least qua…

I worked in such a place. Worst job I’ve ever had, extremely toxic culture, I ended up burning out and quitting. It took me 18 months to recover from my 3 years nightmare there. Never again.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#464

Post by ResearchCode »

crazygringo wrote: post #417
steveBK123 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. A real product driven company with a mature product isn't interacting with customers frequently enough to upend their plans every 1-2 weeks. How do people think Apple develops completely new product lines like the iPhone, iPad, watch, etc. There's a lot more up front planning (and yes .. of course, course corrections) than a lot of agile advocates want to admit. Most agile hyped up senior management I've met…

> isn't interacting with customers frequently enough to upend their plans every 1-2 weeks. As I said, re-planning is more often than not needed because of technical challenges developers are running into. If one person is going to take 4 weeks to deliver something instead of the expected 2 days, lots of things may have to be rejiggered. But also, yes even "real product driven company with a mature products" are chang…

The good software companies do these projects in the 3-6 month length instead of 1-2 weeks.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#465

Post by [deleted] »

jameshart wrote: post #395
ResearchCode wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case for most of the substantial software projects. The plan for the Linux kernel doesn't change each week (do they have "PMs"?). 15% seems very excessive. Almost a whole day a week and two days lost of deep work. Try to aim for 1.5%. Do as much of the planning as possible without a meeting.

1.5% of a workweek is 36 minutes. I don’t know how you can get a team of developers to productively spend 39 hours and 24 minutes of keyboard time productively coding in the same direction with only 36 minutes of discussion.

[deleted]

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#466

Post by whateveracct »

oblio wrote: post #432
whateveracct wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So that's proof that you should never deviate? Hegemony always wins?

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#467

Post by whateveracct »

Xelynega wrote: post #272
vbezhenar wrote: post #252

Earlier 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…

It's easy be prescient when you make self-fulfilling prophecies.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#468

Post by ResearchCode »

jameshart wrote: post #395
ResearchCode wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the case for most of the substantial software projects. The plan for the Linux kernel doesn't change each week (do they have "PMs"?). 15% seems very excessive. Almost a whole day a week and two days lost of deep work. Try to aim for 1.5%. Do as much of the planning as possible without a meeting.

1.5% of a workweek is 36 minutes. I don’t know how you can get a team of developers to productively spend 39 hours and 24 minutes of keyboard time productively coding in the same direction with only 36 minutes of discussion.

That works great in FAANG companies, you might have 1-3 hours of meetings in total a week. That is how your typical PhD program works too, meet with your supervisor once a week. And low meeting culture seems to work just fine for the Linux kernel developers too. You're always free to engage in extracurricular activities, but it's not mandatory.

It's the lesser tier, often non-tech companies doing this kind of micromanagement.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#469

Post by pkolaczk »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #288
whateveracct wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason the 10+ authors (all plenty skilled in Haskell either before joining or due to working on the project) were all gone is because said senior came in and pushed them out. As I said, the team was fully functional, in production, low bug rate, generally happy. Is it really cheaper to rewrite an entire working system (that took a year+ to build in the first place) than to just learn something new? I have l…

Now, every time you hire an engineer they need to spend weeks or months learning Haskell on top of everything else. It now costs the business an extra 50K every time you get a new developer. I like Google's strategy of having the simplest language that anybody can pickup as fast as possible. Go.

> I like Google's strategy of having the simplest language that anybody can pickup as fast as possible. Go.

And then you lose 50k whenever the app crashes in production because someone forgot a nil/err check and your tests didn't catch it. Or you pay extra 50k whenever the whole team needs to spend a week on finding a race condition caused by someone accidentally mutating a shared slice, 20 layers below the place the corruption was seen for the first time. Or you spend extra 50k over the year for fixing all the resource leaks caused by missing defers. Or you spend 50x50k to rewrite everything in a more performant stack because of GC pauses (Discord) ;).

There are multiple ways a project can fail or add unexpected costs, and likely there's no silver bullet. There are trade-offs.

And, btw, as for simplicity, there are dozens of languages easier to learn than Go. E.g. scratch, basic, brainfuck. Why not use them? ;)

Simplicity of a language has it costs. Programs written in simpler languages tend to be more complex to compensate for lower expressive power.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#470

Post by spoonfeeder006 »

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…

I don't know if a 10x is true or not, but its definitely not me

I am slow as a snail

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