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How to be a -10x Engineer

taylor.town

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Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#481

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

This looks like typical variable naming in Haskell. That community just loves one-letter variable names... I'll never understand why.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#482

Post by not_enoch_wise »

flumpcakes wrote: post #40

> 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…

These idiot, overpaid engineers don’t understand how important tickets & tracking metrics are.

As if turning a measurement into a target could make it cease to become a good measurement!

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#483

Post by mgkimsal »

jameshart wrote: post #298
mgkimsal wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Building the wrong thing is expensive. Building pieces that don’t fit together is expensive. Avoiding those mistakes requires investing time in some sort of planning activity. The promise of "agile" is, IIRC, faster turnaround and iterative development. Yes, the 'wrong' thing is expensive. Getting something basic in someone's hands in 2-3 days to get some feedback is usually more productive than days of figma then…

> The promise of "agile" is, IIRC, faster turnaround and iterative development. The promise of agile is working software . Iterative development is a how, not a what.

arguably the goal of any software project is... working software, no?

i understand your point, but also think 'agile' is at least as much of a 'how' as much as a 'what', especially over the last 5 years or so.

"agile" itself would seem to be a 'how'. "agile software development" as a phrase is describing - at least too many folks - 'how' the software development will be carried out.

but... it's also a massive amount of hair splitting it seems.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#484

Post by Herval_freire »

epolanski wrote: post #440
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…

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…

[flagged]

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#485

Post by PaulHoule »

safety1st wrote: post #97
flumpcakes wrote: post #40

> 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…

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…

3) “Engineers” who resist any kind of structure on the assumption that (1) is going on. That, is, the fear of (1) is just as bad as (1). One manifestation of is today is pythoners resisting real solutions to packaging problems thus making packaging problems impossible to solve.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#486

Post by Herval_freire »

The_Colonel wrote: post #412
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…

> You also might get a lead who can ramp up the effectiveness of an entire team by say 3x at most. If the size of the team was N, then it's N*3X. If N is like 4 then it's a 12x increase. This is the closest thing to an actual 10x engineer. But it's not actually a 10x engineer here it's just better management. All of that are arbitrary numbers. 10 is arbitrary and not actually measurable, but your 3, 4 are as well. Bu…

Another thing to think about is how basically every human trait follows a normal distribution.

If mean = 1x (by definition 1x should be the mean) and the std is the maximum possible value (also 1x). Then 10x would be 10 std past the norm.

This makes my numbers not arbitrary. 2x or 3x would only be 2 or 3 std past the norm. Which is reasonable (only if the std = 1x which is likely not the case and is most likely lower).

If a 10xer existed, That's like saying you found a human who runs 10x faster then the mean (10mph) or you found a human 10x taller than the mean (5'10"). 10 is arbitrary but 2 or 3 is less arbitrary. Ever heard of the company 3sigma? The name represents Rarest non arbitrary anomaly from the norm.

It is actually fundamentally illogical to think of human ability in terms of a multiple of the mean because no other measurable human quality follows that kind of distribution. Almost all of these measured things follow the normal distribution.

You are therefore highly highly unlikely to find a 10x engineer or a -10x engineer. This applies even to things like engineering leadership.

When viewed from this lens you can actually see that it's actually very unlikely for even the best leader to improve the productivity of every member of his team by even 2x. So I take that back. Likely what we are seeing is something like a 1.1x.or 1.2x increase and our minds are exaggerating the effect like an optical illusion.

The concept of measuring any human trait along multiples of the mean via 1x or 2x or 3x or 10x is fundamentally unrealistic when you take a data driven viewpoint of normal distributions. Everyone on this thread is erroneously following this model and while my instincts were more tempered, to a certain extent even I'm following this erroneous model as I declared 3x to be within the realm of reality.

We are all going about this all wrong (including me), the data driven conclusion is that at best you can find 2x engineers and they are freaking rare (because the actual std is nowhere near 1x). The maximum likely delta between the best engineer and worst engineer is 4z, where in this case the z represents 1/2x or an engineer half as good as the average.

Likely people are anecdotally seeing this 4z delta and their mind is exaggerating the delta to 10x. From what we know of statistical reality an actual 10x is unlikely to happen at all.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#487

Post by boring_twenties »

ryandrake wrote: post #277
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute priority quickly becomes washed out - everything gets shoved to one end of the range. A useful priority scheme might be, insert the ticket in the list of open tickets by urgency and importance. Something like that, that you can actually make arguments about and compare.

Almost every software company I've ever worked with had this insidious "priority inflation" that couldn't be stopped. It works like this: We start out with some sensible definition of priority for bugs: P3 = nice-to-have, P2 = low-priority-but-ship-blocking, P1 = emergency-fix-this-now. Bug intake goes on for a while under this system. Some bug filers don't feel their P3 or P2 bugs are getting worked on, so they "pro…

Seems like an easy fix.

1) Allow developers to change the priority, i.e. downgrade P0 to P1 or P2, with all subscribers notified. Optionally, always downgrade to the lowest possible priority.

2) Shame people for inappropriately using P0. After a few strikes, remove their ability to do so.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#488

Post by debatem1 »

Herval_freire wrote: post #351
debatem1 wrote: post #348

Earlier 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.

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.

I didn't say "competent and qualified engineers". I said "experts".

I won't waste any more words on someone who willfully misunderstands them.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#489

Post by whateveracct »

pkolaczk wrote: post #471
whateveracct wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more costs than onboarding costs. Also it's not hard to hire Haskellers or Haskell-adjacent devs. Haskell in fact makes you stand out. Those sorts of people don't need months. I've seen people new to Haskell make their first commits within a week. And they weren't geniuses or anything. But they also didn't have an attitude about it.

I guess the problem with Haskell is not really hiring, but it is simply a very hard sell to people without academic background. Haskell is for sure elegant, and has some cool features, but this is too little to get wide adoption. Seriously, what important industrial problems does it solve? Explain it to me like to a manager you met in an elevator. If you say e.g. lower bug rate, then be prepared to show some evidence…

So "bug rate" is not a real hard metric anyways. And I only have my experience to go on.

But I will say that bugs in Haskell tend to be easier to diagnose (helpful at 2am) and aren't usually bad (although they can be). I have debugged Other People's Code while on-call in Haskell way easier than any other language.

And finally, the vast majority of bugs can be prevented or curbed by the type system. I find every time a Haskell company runs into a nasty bug or annoying issue, libraries that make use of the type system are made that reduce or remove that class of bug entirely. This sounds like you can do it in every language, but really what can be made a "library" in Haskell dwarfs what you can reasonably library-ify in most other languages.

Now, I can't give quantitative evidence of this because I don't even know how I would begin to measure it. But these qualities are definitely a big reason why I don't even listen to job offers that aren't Haskell anymore (going on 10 years of that soon) and I have and will promptly quit a job if the company moves off Haskell.

Re: How to be a -10x Engineer

#490

Post by The_Colonel »

Herval_freire wrote: post #486
The_Colonel wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You also might get a lead who can ramp up the effectiveness of an entire team by say 3x at most. If the size of the team was N, then it's N*3X. If N is like 4 then it's a 12x increase. This is the closest thing to an actual 10x engineer. But it's not actually a 10x engineer here it's just better management. All of that are arbitrary numbers. 10 is arbitrary and not actually measurable, but your 3, 4 are as well. Bu…

Another thing to think about is how basically every human trait follows a normal distribution. If mean = 1x (by definition 1x should be the mean) and the std is the maximum possible value (also 1x). Then 10x would be 10 std past the norm. This makes my numbers not arbitrary. 2x or 3x would only be 2 or 3 std past the norm. Which is reasonable (only if the std = 1x which is likely not the case and is most likely lower…

> ...and the std is the maximum possible value (also 1x). Then 10x would be 10 std past the norm.

Sorry, but this is a completely arbitrary definition and honestly one I've never seen so far.

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