Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 438 posts

Re: Is something bugging you?

#311

Post by [deleted] »

JimDabell wrote: post #160
randomdata wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fundament…

[deleted]

Re: Is something bugging you?

#312

Post by joantune »

strangattractor wrote: post #306
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…

6.5 X 15 is only 97 hours per week not even close to the 400 hrs (5X40) per week of programming a 10X Rust programmer can provide. I jest but all this 10X stuff is getting ridiculous. They stayed in "Stealth" mode because they didn't have anything worth showing for 5 years. Doesn't sound all that productive to me. More likely what they are trying to do was hard and complicated and took a while to figure out.

They're not boasting about their current productivity, they're boasting about the one they achieved at FoundationDB when they implemented the testing, which gave them the idea to build antithesis

Re: Is something bugging you?

#313

Post by pshc »

benrutter wrote: post #98

This is a great pitch, and I don't want to come across as negative, but I feel like a statement like "we found all bugs" can only be true with a very narrow definition of bug. The most pernicious, hard-to-find bugs that I've come across have all been around the business logic of an application, rather than it hitting into an error state. I'm thinking of the category where you have something like "a database is curren…

I feel like business logic bugs live on a separate layer, the application layer, and it's not fair to count those against the database itself.

I agree that suboptimal query planning would be a database-layer bug, a defect which could easily be missed by the bug-testing framework.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#314

Post by lifeisstillgood »

6510 wrote: post #295
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 had an idea once but when I tried to explain it people didn't understand. I revisited earlier thought: communication is a 2 man job, one is to not make an effort to understand while the other explains things poorly. It always manages to never work out. Periodically I thought about the puzzle and was eventually able to explain it such that people thought it was brilliant ~ tho much to complex to execute. I thought a…

That’s pretty good. It needs an Athena poster :-)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#315

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

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 don't agree with that, there are a _lot_ of completely crap developers and they get put into positions where even the ones capable of doing so aren't allowed to because it's not on a ticket.

I've seen some thing.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#316

Post by joantune »

confidantlake wrote: post #291
mettamage wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not convinced that just starting early is all there is to it. I started Math, Sports, and Piano at like 6 years old but there are still plenty of "10x " people that figuratively and literally run circles around me. Talent is a real thing.

The intensity you did it though matters. You probably didn't spend that many years on a specific sport for instance.

And when we're talking about sports, genetics matter as well (depending on each one)

When we're talking brains, while genetics also matter, assuming normal (whatever that is) brain, the plasticity changes a lot how it operates.

So, the 10 years thing is definitely a big if not the biggest part. In my opinion. Would love to see studies if any exist out there on this

Re: Is something bugging you?

#317

Post by joantune »

jjjjj55555 wrote: post #231
mettamage wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some people organize their time and focus their efforts more efficiently than others. They also use tools that others might not even know or careabout. You probably surf the internet 10x faster than your parents. Yes you've probably had more exposure than them, but you could probably teach them how to do it just as fast. But would they want to learn and would they actually adapt what you taught them?

With motivation, repetition, and those depend on how plastic your brain is, thus the age, yes!

Re: Is something bugging you?

#318

Post by joantune »

eschneider wrote: post #247
mettamage wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not even sure that coding _much_ faster than necessary is even required to give a 3-5x multiple on "average", let alone "worst case" developers. Some of the biggest productivity wins can be had by being able to look at requirements, knowing what's right or wrong about them, and getting everyone on the same page so the thing only needs to be made once. Being good at test and debug so problems are identified and fi…

Underrated comment

Re: Is something bugging you?

#319

Post by SilasX »

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

There’s the distinction between correctness and fitness for purpose which I think is helpful for clarifying the issues here.

Correctness bug: it didn’t do what the spec says it should do.

Fitness for purpose bug: it does what the spec says to do, but, with better knowledge, the spec isn’t what you actually want.

Edit: looks like this maps, respectively, to failing verification and failing validation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39359673

Edit2: My earlier comment on the different things that get called "bugs", before I was aware of this terminology: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22259973

Re: Is something bugging you?

#320

Post by mrinterweb »

shuntress wrote: post #300

> a platform that takes your software and hunts for bugs in it Ok but, what actually IS it? It seems like it is a cloud service that will run integration tests. I have to figure out how to deploy to this special environment and I still have to write those integration tests using special libraries. But even after all that integration refactoring, how is this supposed to help me find actual bugs that I wouldn't already…

I came away with the same questions.
Post reply on HN