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antithesis.com

141–150 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#141

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

On my team, one of the main multipliers is understanding the need behind the requested implementation, and proposing alternative solutions - minimizing or avoiding code changes altogether. It helps that we work on internal tooling and are very close to the process and stakeholders.

"Hmmm, there's another way to accomplish this" being the 10x. Doing things faster is not it.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#142

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule;…

It's almost impossible to get executives to think in return on equity (“RoE”) for the future instead of “costs” measured in dollars and cents last quarter.

Which is weird, since so many executives are working in a VC-funded environment, and internal work should be “venture funded” as well.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#143
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post author here. Sorry it was vague, but there's only so much detail you can go into in a blog post aimed at general audiences. Our documentation ( https://antithesis.com/docs/ ) has a lot more info. Here's my attempt at a more complete answer: think of the story of the blind men and the elephant. There's a thing, called fuzzing, invented by security researchers. There's a thing, called property-based testing, inven…

> most software is non-deterministic Doesn't Antithesis rely on the fact that software is always deterministic? Reproducibility appears to be its top selling feature – something that wouldn't be possible if software were non-deterministic.

We can force any* software to be deterministic.

* Offer only good for x86-64 software that runs on Linux whose dependencies you can install locally or mock. The first two restrictions we will probably relax someday.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the worst engineer certainly has negative productivity, so I'm not sure that your explanation can possibly be the correct one.

I’m explaining what the terms “10x” and “1x” mean, not asserting that the original observation is correct under all circumstances.

i believe the original was for an entire "organizations" performance, and was also done in 1977. Since they are averages, It makes "sense" to conclude that the best of a good team is 10x better than the average of the worst team. Not really what the experimwnt concludes but what can you do.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#146
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.

The “10x engineer” comes from the observation that there is a 10x difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. By saying that you want to be a 1x engineer, you’re saying you want to be the least productive engineer possible. 1x is not the average, 1x is the worst.

I'm not sure your math works.

What we do know is that the worst engineers provide negative productivity. If 1x is the worst engineer, then let's for the sake of discussion denote x as -1 in order for the product to be negative. Except that means the 10x engineer provides -10 productivity, actually making them the worst engineer. Therein lies a conflict.

What we also know is that best engineer has positive productivity, so that means the multiplicand must always be positive. Which means that it is the multiplier that must go negative, meaning that a -1x and maybe even a -10x engineer exists.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m explaining what the terms “10x” and “1x” mean, not asserting that the original observation is correct under all circumstances.

i believe the original was for an entire "organizations" performance, and was also done in 1977. Since they are averages, It makes "sense" to conclude that the best of a good team is 10x better than the average of the worst team. Not really what the experimwnt concludes but what can you do.

The first was 1968, but there have been more studies since.

https://www.construx.com/blog/the-origins-of-10x-how-valid-i...

Re: Is something bugging you?

#148
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it doesn't actually explain in what it does: Is it fuzzing? Do you supply your own test cases? Is it testing hardware non-determinism?

Post author here. Sorry it was vague, but there's only so much detail you can go into in a blog post aimed at general audiences. Our documentation ( https://antithesis.com/docs/ ) has a lot more info. Here's my attempt at a more complete answer: think of the story of the blind men and the elephant. There's a thing, called fuzzing, invented by security researchers. There's a thing, called property-based testing, inven…

This vaguely reminds me of Jefferson's "Virtual Time" paper from 1985[1]. The underlying idea at the time didn't really take off because it required, like Zookeeper, a greenfield project: except that it kinda doesn't and today you could imagine instrumenting an entire Linux syscall table and letting any Linux container become a virtual time system -- but Linux didn't exist in 1985 and wouldn't be standard until much later.

So Jefferson just says, let's take your I/O-ful process, split it a message-passing actor model, and monitor all the messages going in and coming out. The messages coming out, they won't necessarily do what they're supposed to do yet, they'll just be recorded with a plus sign and a virtual timestamp, and by assumption eventually you'll block on some response. So we have a bunch of recorded message timestamps coming in, we have your recorded messages going out.

Well, there's a problem here, which is that if we have multiple actors we may discover that their timestamps have traveled out-of-order. You sent some message at t=532 but someone actually sent you a message at t=231 that you might have selected instead of whatever you actually selected to send the t=532 message. (For instance in the OS case, they might have literally sent a SIGKILL to your process and you might not have sent anything after that.) That's what the plus sign is for, indirectly: we can restart your process from either a known synchronization state or else from the very beginning, we know all of its inputs during its first run so we have "determinized" it up past t=231 to see what it does now. Now, it sends a new message at say t=373. So we use the opposite of +, the minus sign, to send to all the other processes the "undo" message for their t=532 message, this removes it from their message buffer: that will never be sent to them. And if they haven't hit that timestamp in their personal processing yet, no further action is needed, otherwise we need to roll them back too. Doing so you determinize the whole networked cluster.

The only other really modern implementation of these older ideas that I remember seeing was Haxl[2], a Haskell library which does something similar but rather than using a virtual time coordinate, it just uses a process-local cache: when you request any I/O, it first fetches from the cache if possible and then if that's not possible it goes out, fetches the data, and then caches it. As a result you can just offer someone a pre-populated cache which, with these recorded inputs, will regenerate the offending stack trace deterministically.

1: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3916.3988

2: https://github.com/facebook/Haxl

Re: Is something bugging you?

#149

> The biggest effect was that it gave our tiny engineering team the productivity of a team 50x its size. I feel like the idea of the legendary "10x" developer has been bastardized to just mean workers who work 15 hours a day 6.5 days a week to get something out the door until they burn out. But here's your real 10x (or 50x) productivity. People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to…

On my team, one of the main multipliers is understanding the need behind the requested implementation, and proposing alternative solutions - minimizing or avoiding code changes altogether. It helps that we work on internal tooling and are very close to the process and stakeholders. "Hmmm, there's another way to accomplish this" being the 10x. Doing things faster is not it.

Exactly this. It’s why it’s so frustrating when product managers who think they’re above giving background run the show (the ones who think they’re your manager and are therefore too important to share that with you)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule;…

It's almost impossible to get executives to think in return on equity (“RoE”) for the future instead of “costs” measured in dollars and cents last quarter. Which is weird, since so many executives are working in a VC-funded environment, and internal work should be “venture funded” as well.

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