231–240 of 668 posts
He ended up promoted; in many organizations, people that hack the code rather than properly design and build sustainable solutions are highly valued.
I worked at a company for a couple years where you had to produce 10 points a week or you got pipped. Didn't matter if you were a jr or sr. I worked on a few teams there and you could immediately tell how the teams measured points by the stress level of the developers. Teams that attempted to measure the points in good faith were stessed and most of them showed signs of burn out. They regularly worked 60 hours a week…
> Teams that attempted to measure the points in good faith were stessed and most of them showed signs of burn out. They regularly worked 60 hours a week. So in the short term, the company benefited, yeah? They got more work out of the same people than they would have if they didn't apply the pressure. Reminds me of an old boss I had who would flat-out say that to get a project done we would "hire someone and burn the…
But it sure is a shame we're past the days where you actually want to retain and nurture tribal knowledge. imagine if other engineering disciplines simply hopped companies every 2 years, or if they cut half their civil engineers for a better earnings call (thankfully, he government doesn't have "shareholders". just taxpayers to disappoint).
Reminds me of an anecdote about Bell Labs. Someone calculated who the most productive employees were (based on things like patents received), and found that many of them would eat lunch with the same person. That person wasn't individually very productive, but he would always ask thoughtful, compelling questions that in turn made his coworkers measurably more productive.
It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that is what was written. Would you like to say something about it?
[flagged]
I disagree.
>People are free to draw inferences about how it would be to pair with this programmer and why they are rarely paired.
you could. but there's not much to work with. could be helpful but "too valuable" to be a mentor compared to a director or pitching sales or doing conferences. Could be overly pompous and makes things worse. Could simply be office culture and pair programming for more than 15 minutes isn't a thing (like all my previous jobs).
All are extreme assumptions that aren't productive to talk about. Personally: I don't know if I'd want to be in those cultures that enforced pair programming X times a week, but I wouldn't mind , say, a day a month where I could shadow a lead or vice versa and get some intimite knowledge, be it in correcting some pitfalls in my coding or seeing how a more experienced mind ticks. But the chance hasn't come up yet.
I am a disagreeable giver myself and I have experienced a lot of backlash by the higher ups inside companies for being one, while also being praised a lot by my colleagues that were working alongside me.
A previous discussions about it:
"The best employees are not the agreeable ones" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17386640
It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…
It sucks being that person today because everything is about optics and that person will get purged. I know from experience. Team players, mentors, software architects; they tend to be tossed aside to make room for coders who can churn out large amounts of code, even as the company's capacity to deliver and maintain features declines over time due to tech debt. Managers always love a developer who can consistently wr…
It sucked being that person back then too. The idea of measuring everything and acting on the numbers you can get is from the 19th century. Managers have been doing that same kind of practice since then, with the same kind of result (it's a very reliable result), without a change.
It’s like Draymond Green. Individually his statistics suck. He’s jokingly called Mr Triple Single (a triple double is a major achievement, a triple single not so much). But he’s such a fantastic defensive coordinator and playmaker that his impact metrics on the team are massive. Like practically comparable to Steph, his more lauded teammate, in some stretches. A common refrain in basketball is that people forget it’s…
That impact should show up in the plus/minus score? https://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm For 2022/23 Green ranks 38. His defensive impact is very high but it is offset by his negative offensive impact.
It’s easy to fall victim to the McNamara fallacy (I’ve certainly been guilty of it), before you start understanding the innumerable intricacies in the domain. And basketball is the only domain I probably know better than 99% of HNers lol.
That being said, GP’s general point about Draymond is very true. Yes he’s one of the best defensive players of all time and one of the smartest as well. I think the main point is his incredible self awareness (yes get the jokes off). On defense it’s more subtle, such as not over committing and leaving his man etc but on offense is where it’s obvious. As his own shooting has fallen off a cliff, more and more when he’s dribbling unguarded he frantically looks around for Steph or klay to flow into a dribble hand off to pry them free for a shot.
He’s talked extensively about the criticism he’s faced for lack of shot attempts, with his rational being why would he ever shoot if he can instead try to get Steph a shot. He’s also mentioned if Klay hasn’t touched the ball in a few possessions, he makes sure to get Klay the ball with at least a decent look; otherwise the next time Klay gets the ball he’s shooting it regardless of how bad the shot is. He also frequently pushes the break[1] to catch the defense off guard and before they can set up.
He is still a negative offensively, but why I appreciate draymond so much is for the above reasons and the myriad other subtleties he does to maximize his benefit to the team and diminish the detrimental elements of his.
And lastly, standard plus minus is still a hell of a lot better than box score garbage, I don’t mean to crap on it.
[0]: https://squared2020.com/2017/09/18/deep-dive-on-regularized-...
[1]: http://stats.inpredictable.com/nba/onoff.php?season=2022&tea...
(Steph actually ranked higher than Dray last year in pace (seconds per possession) on/off which is why separating Draymond himself is so difficult. Their relationship is certainly symbiotic, but Draymond is the one that optimizes for best interplay of their skills)
Tim’s productivity score was zero I also have a Tim in my team but he is a net negative. Most of the time he would try to pair up. He just make noises that implies he is following your work. But you can see that is not the case when he tries to make a comment or a suggestion, he is clueless. Trying explaining things to him is a waste of time. Rarely he decides to work on a task himself. No matter how trivial the task…