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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#251

Post by VoodooJuJu »

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…

10x developer is just a buzzword people throw around when they're trying to sell you something.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#252

Post by xnx »

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…

Anyone can be a 10x engineer when they write something similar/identical to what they've written before. Other jobs are not like this. A plumber may only be 20% faster on the best days of their career.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#253

Post by ManuelKiessling »

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…

What makes a car go fast? The brakes:

https://manuel.kiessling.net/2011/04/07/why-developing-witho...

Re: Is something bugging you?

#254

Post by tantaman »

AlienRobot wrote: post #210
giantg2 wrote: 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.

Do 10x engineers get 10x the wages? Somehow I feel being exceptionally better than other engineers is just unfair to both of you and the ones worse than you. I wouldn't want to be a 10x either, I'd rather just be normal engineer.

Meta compensates 10x types very well. 3x bonus multipliers, additional equity that can range from 100k-1m+, and level increases are a huge bump to comp (https://www.levels.fyi/)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#255

Post by pinkmuffinere »

Aachen wrote: post #111
adamauckland wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider a "bug" to be "it was supposed to do something and failed". Issues around business logic are not failures of the system, the system worked to spec, the spec was not comprehensive enough and now we iterate.

What do you call it when the spec is wrong? Like clearly actually wrong, such as when someone copied a paragraph from one CRUD-describing page to the next and forgot to change the word "thing1" to "thing2" in the delete description. Because I'd call that a bug. A spec bug, but a bug. It's no feature request to make the code based on the newer page delete thing2 rather than thing1, it's fixing a defect

Ya, I would like a word for this as well. I naturally refer to this category of error as bug, but this occasionally leads to significant conflict with others at work. I now default to calling _almost everything_ a feature request, which is obviously dumb but less likely to get me into trouble. If there is a better word for "it does exactly what we planned, but what we planned was wrong" I would love to adopt it.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#256

Post by ijustlovemath »

We've done something similar for our medical device; totally deterministic simulations that cover all sorts of real world scenarios and help us improve our product. When you have determinism, you can make changes and just rerun the whole thing to make sure you actually addressed the problems you found.

Another nice side effect is that if you hang on to the specification for the simulation, you only have to hang on to core metrics from the simulation, since the entire program state can be reproduced in a debugger by just using the same specification on the same code version.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#258

Post by sneak »

mgfist wrote: post #33
sneak wrote: post #25

Imagine being proud of working for Palantir.

Your life depends on lots of unsavory tasks.

Yes, like sewage pipe maintenance. Not data mining to figure out who to assassinate without trial.

Using the “unsavory” euphemism for unethical and illegal violence is somewhat of a deception, is it not?

Re: Is something bugging you?

#259

Post by mjevans »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #239
didgetmaster wrote: post #113

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;…

This reminds me of the "Parable of the Two Programmers." [1] A story about what happens to a brilliant developer given an identical task to a mediocre developer. [1] I preserved a copy of it on my (no-advertising or monetization) blog here: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...

I can't seem to find it in a google search, maybe I'm just recalling entirely the wrong terms.

In the early computing era there was a competition. Something like take some input and produce an output. One programmer made a large program in (IIRC) Fortran with complex specifications documentation etc. The other used shell pipes, sort, and a small handful or two of other programs in a pipeline to accomplish the same task in like 10 developer min.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#260

Post by BobbyTables2 »

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…

> People who implement something very few people even considered or understood to be possible, which then gives amazing leverage to deliver working software in a fraction of the time.

I agree with the first part of your statement, but what really happens to such people?

In my experience (sample size greater than one), they receive some kudos, but remain underpaid, never promoted, and are given more work under tight deadlines. At least until some of them are laid off along with lower performers.

But for those who say that hard things are impossible, they seem to get along just fine. They merely declare such things as out-of-scope or lie about their roadmap.

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