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antithesis.com

151–160 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#151
post #92

> 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…

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

You took the words right out of my mouth

Re: Is something bugging you?

#152
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually…

> Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis You and I have worked at very different organizations. Everywhere I've been has had insane levels of inefficiency in literally every process.

same here - it is especially bad in huge companies, the inefficiencies and waste are legendary.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#153
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.

[deleted]

Re: Is something bugging you?

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Aren't you just 'forcing' determinism in the inputs, relying on the software to be always deterministic for the same inputs?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#155

This might be the best introduction post I've read. Lays the foundation (get it?) for who the people are and what they've built. Then explains how the current thing they are building is a result of the previous thing. It feels that they actually want this problem solved for everyone because they have experienced how good the solution feels. Then tells us about the teams (pretty big names with complex systems) that ha…

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?

Sure, it doesn't go into details. And that is exactly why I termed it an excellent introduction and a sales pitch.

I haven't heard of deterministic testing before. Nor have I heard of FoundationDB or the related things. And I went from knowing zero things about them to getting impressed and interested. This led me to go into their docs, blogs, landing page, etc. to know more.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#156
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good summary of the hard part of being a software developer that deals with clients.

What software developer does not deal with clients (and makes a living)?

lots of software developers never deal with clients (clients as in the people who will actually use the software) - most of them in fact, in any of the big companies I have worked for anyway...and that is probably not a good thing.

I myself, prefer to work with the people who will actually use what I build - get a better product hat way.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it looks like containerization is required: https://antithesis.com/docs/getting_started/setup.html#conta...

Containers are doing two jobs for us: they give our customers a convenient way to send us software to run, and they give us a convenient place to simulate the network boundary between different machines in a distributed system. The whole guest operating system running the containers is also running inside the deterministic hypervisor and under test (and it's mostly just NixOS Linux, not something weird that we wrote)…

Oh, cool to hear you're using NixOS. The Nix philosophy totally gels with the philosophy described in the post.

But it's also probably fair to describe NixOS as something weird that somebody else wrote :)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 productivit…

You are arguing against the idea that there is a factor of ten difference in productivity between the best and the worst engineers. That’s fine if you want to do that, but that’s explicitly where the term “10x engineer” comes from and what defines its meaning. So if you disagree with the underlying concept, there is no way for you to use terms like “[n]x engineer” coherently since you disagree with its most fundamental premise. You certainly shouldn’t reinvent different meanings for these terms.
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