> We thought about this and decided to just go all out and write a hypervisor which emulates a deterministic computer.
Huh. Yes, that would work. It's in the category of obvious in hindsight. That is a very convincing sales pitch.
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321–330 of 438 posts
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#322Earlier 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...
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
― Abraham Lincoln
I have started to follow this 'lately' (for a decade) and it has worked miracles. As for the anxious managers/clients, I keep them updated of the design/documentation/though process, mentioning the risks of the path-not-taken, and that maintain their peace of mind. But this depends heavily on the client and the managers.
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#323> 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…
How many organisations - of any kind, startups or enterprise or unicorns or whatever - will invest so much in effort that doesn't even touch the product. Before the product exists!
I think the reluctance to invest effort in something that will give devs super-powers 6 months in the future is why we don't get all those 10x devs.
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#324This 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…
It seems like marketing copy. Not a technical blog post. It would be nice to see some actual use cases and examples. Instead, the writer just name-dropped a few big companies and claimed to have a revolutionary product that works magically. Then include the typical buzzwords like '10x programmer' and 'stealth mode'. The latter doesn't make sense because they also name-drop clients.
It absolutely doesn’t read like typical marketing copy, and yes it’s not a dense technical blog post either. I’m sure the use cases and examples will come, but putting them in this post would have been overkill.
Also, stealth mode just means your company isn’t public, you can still have clients.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#325Earlier 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…
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" pha…
I also had a lot of luck with interns.
At my previous company I had 2 first-job juniors and 4 or 5 interns that were outstanding.
(however the last one was totally terrible and totally killed my hiring credibility hah, but it was a 80% success rate still)
I find that there are too many pretenders, though. I get way too many people with 15 years of experience and ChatGPT resumes that just can't code at all :/
Re: Is something bugging you?
#326Earlier 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…
Yes: Programmers who start at twelve are often the 10x programmers who can really program faster than the average developer by a lot. No: It's not because they have 10 more years of experience. Read "The Mythical Man Month." That's the book that popularized the concept that some developers were 5-25x faster than others. One of the takeaways was that the speed of a developer was not correlated with experience. At all.…
The association with video games in your last paragraph makes a lot of sense to me. This is how I feel solving problems.
I always thought that people who start at 12 and keep at it are good because they really love it.I see people who struggle a lot with learning, and it's because they hate it but are doing it for other reasons.
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#327Re: Is something bugging you?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ta…
Sounds like "Knuth vs McIlroy", which has been discussed on hn and elsewhere before, and the general take is that it was somewhat unfair to Knuth. [1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/BentleyEtAl8... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+vs+mcilroy
This is the competition I was thinking of. I must have read it in a dead-image PDF version some other time on HN. This paper isn't the one I recall but the solution is exactly the sort I vaguely recalled.
I'm trying to copy-in the program as it might have existed, with some obvious updates to work in today's shells ...
#!/bin/sh
tr -cs A-Za-z '
' "${2:-/dev/stdin}" |\
tr A-Z a-z |\
sort |\
uniq -c |\
sort -rn |\
sed ${1:-100}q
Edited: Removed some errors likely induced by OCR / me not catching that in the initial transcription from the browser view of the file.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
I did spend years on a specific sport starting as a kid. I was average. There were people that first played the sport as teenagers and within a year were competitive nationally.
I was in the same math classes as some of my peers for a decade+. Some people were great, some were bad and most were somewhere in between. The kids who were exceptional at 9 were exceptional at 17.
Obviously time matters but genetics play a huge role as well. I have a family friend with 2 adopted kids and 2 biological kids. The adopted ones are average but the biological ones are very smart. Just like their parents.
Re: Is something bugging you?
#330Earlier 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…
All of the things you list are the product of the experience that OP is talking about. Anyone can get there with 20 years of (sufficiently rigorous) experience by ~40, but people who start as a child have a head start and it does show.
It's probably especially obvious in the child-prodigy types because we as an industry have a tendency to force people out of IC roles by 40, so the child prodigies are the only ones who have enough time to develop 20 years of experience working directly with code.