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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#221

Post by randomdata »

sebastianz wrote: post #200
randomdata wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or is. If a 1x puts in an 8 hour day, a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day. That leaves plenty of time to read this.

His point is that smart and productive people are generally hard working, focused and diligent, which is how they get to be so experienced and productive. Hence not wasting time on social networks. > a 10x only has to put in a 48 minute day Nobody would call this person "10x".

> His point is that smart and productive people are generally hard working, focused and diligent

I don't think that tracks. Smart, productive, hard working people don't work 9-5. They work every hour they can, breaking only when they have pushed themselves to the limit. The limit can be hit at any hour. There is no magical property of the universe that gives people unlimited stamina during the hours of 9-5.

> Nobody would call this person "10x".

I'm not sure they would call anyone that, to be fair. A "10x developer" who also puts in 8 hours alongside the 1x developers isn't a 10x developer, he would be called a sucker.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#222

Post by nlavezzo »

mettamage wrote: post #173
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> 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…

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/a…

Nick with Antithesis here with a funny story on this.

I became friends with Dave our CTO when I was 5 or 6, we were neighbors. He'd already started coding little games in Basic (this was 1985). Later in our friendship, like when I was maybe 10, I asked him if he could help me learn to code, which he did. After a week or two I had made some progress but compared what I could do to what he was doing and figured "I guess I just started too late, what's the point?".

I found out later that most people didn't start coding till late HS or college! It worked out though - I'm programmer adjacent and have taken care of the business side of our projects through the years :)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#223

Post by KuriousCat »

didgetmaster wrote: post #207
happytiger wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because most executives can’t understand technology deeply enough to know the difference.

Even when they are smart enough to know, they seem to have very short memories. While I don't consider myself to be a 10x engineer; I have certainly done a number of 10x things over my career. I worked for a company where I almost single handedly built a product that resulted in tens of millions of dollars in sales. I got a nice 'atta boy' for it, but my future ideas were often overridden by someone in management who…

This is the sad part of it, many people without core competence end up in "leadership" positions and remove any "perceived" threats to their authority. I believe part of it is due to the absence of leadership training in the engineering curriculum. Colleges should encourage engineers to take up few leadership courses and get them trained on things like Influence and Power.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#224

Post by mrkeen »

mempko wrote: post #104

In my career I learned two powerful tools to get bug free code. Design by Contract and Randomized testing. I had to roll this by myself for each project I did. Antithesis seems to systematize it and created great tooling around it. That's Great!!! However, looking at their docs they rely on assertion failures to find bugs. I believe Antithesis has a missed opportunity here by not properly pushing for Design by Contra…

I've never gotten anything more out of DbC than it being assertions and if-statements, but described using fancy English. I even worked with the creator of C4J a few years ago.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#226

Post by randomdata »

_dain_ wrote: post #212
randomdata wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, by emulating a deterministic computer you can ensure that the inputs to the software are always deterministic – something traditional computing environments are unable to offer for various reasons. However, if we pretend that software was somehow able to be non-deterministic, it would be able to evade your deterministic computer. But since software is always deterministic, you just have to guarantee determinis…

[I work at Antithesis] >But since software is always deterministic, you just have to guarantee determinism in the inputs. This is technically correct, but that's a very load-bearing "just". A lot of things would have to count as inputs. Think about execution time, for example. CPUs don't execute at the same speed all the time because of automatic throttling. Network packets have different flight times. Threads and pr…

> Think about execution time, for example.

Sure. A good example. Execution time – more accurately, execution speed – isn't a property of software. For example, as you point out yourself, you can alter the execution speed without altering the software. It is, indeed, an input.

> Even if you had all those inputs, how are you going to pass them in?

Well, we know how to pass them in non-deterministically. That's how software is able to do anything.

Perhaps one could create a simulated environment that is able to control all the inputs? In fact, I'm told there is a company known as Antithesis working on exactly that.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#227

Post by sfink »

shermantanktop wrote: post #82

I kept cringing when I read the words “no bugs.” This is hubris in the classic style - it’s asking for a literal thunderbolt from the heavens. It may be true, but…come on. Everyone who has ever written a program has thought they were done only to find one more bug. It’s the fundamental experience of programming to asymptotically approach zero bugs but never actually get there. Again, perhaps the claim is true but it…

Yeah, same. It suggests that you must be employing one of the time-honored approaches to getting zero bugs:

* Redefine all bugs as features

* Redefine "bug" to conveniently only apply to the things your system prevents

* Don't write software

This reminds me of bugzilla's "Zarro Boogs" phrase that pointedly avoids saying "Zero Bugs" because it's such a deceptive term, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugzilla

Being able to say "no bugs" with justifiable confidence, even when restricting it to some class of bugs, is truly a great and significant thing. cf Rust. But claiming to have no bugs is cringeworthy.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#228

Post by theamk »

mettamage wrote: post #173
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> 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…

When I was in college, I've met a few people that coded _a lot_ faster than me. Typically, they started since they were 12 instead of 21 (like me). That's how 10x engineers exist, by the time they are 30, they have roughly 20 years of programming experience behind their belt instead of 10. Also, their professional experience is much greater. Sure, their initial jobs at 15 are the occassional weird gig for the uncle/a…

Last year, we had 2 new hires.. one is fresh out of college (and not one of the top ones), other with 15 years experience on resume in our industry.

I am not sure there is 10x difference, but there is at least 5x difference in performance, in favor of fresh college grad, and they are now working on the more complex tasks too.

The sad part is our hiring is still heavily in "senior engineer with lots of experience" phase, and intership program has been canceled.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#229

Post by whatshisface »

BoppreH wrote: post #97

Three thoughts: 1. It's a brilliant idea that came at the right time. It feels like people are finally losing patience with flaky software, see developer sentiment on: fuzzers, static typing, memory safety, standardized protocols, containers, etc. 2. It's meant to be niche. $2 per hour per CPU (or $7000 per year per CPU if reserved), no free tier for hobby or FOSS, and the only way to try/buy is to contact them. Ouch…

$2 per hour per CPU could be expensive or inexpensive, depending on how long it takes to fuzz your program. I wonder how that multiplies out in real use cases?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#230

Post by sangnoir »

didgetmaster wrote: post #113
jimbokun wrote: post #35

> 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 seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does

I'd be happier if industry cares more for team productivity - I have witnessed how rewarding "10x" individuals may lead to perverse results on a wider scale, a la Cobra Effect. In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs quickly, but would create multiple smaller bugs and regressions for the 1x developers to fix while he moved to the next big problem worthy of his attention. Everyone else ended up being 0.7x - which made the curse of an engineer look even more productive comparatively!

Because he was allowed to break the rules, there was a growing portion of the codebase that only he could work on - while it wasn't Rust, imagine an org has a "No Unsafe Rust" rule that is optional to 1 guy. Organizations ought to be very careful how they measure productivity, and should certainly look beyond first-order metrics.

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