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Is something bugging you?

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#331

Post by whstl »

t-3 wrote: post #198
lukan wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Does anyone else feel like people follow these sort of industry pop-culture terms a bit too intensely? " Agreed, there is too much effort going into the "superstars" theme, but there are definitely people who get 10x done in the same time as others.

Yep. No matter what you're doing, some people are more productive than others. Often it's a matter of experience and practice, sometimes ability to focus, sometimes motivation, rarely it's a lack or surplus of inherent ability. Using people effectively in the context of a team all depends on the skill of the manager though.

I think a lot of people that complain about 10x chattery in HN should take some kind of carpentry etc course or some other kind of handiwork like that with a real master.

Some of those people not only get things done much quicker, but they also get it done with better quality than an amateur, with less mistakes, throwing away less material, sometimes with more safety.

This is definitely more than 10x better. And there are some real hacks doing those kinds of jobs. I find programming to be not different than that.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#332

Post by pinkmuffinere »

Aachen wrote: post #272
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I reported such a bug to some software my company uses (Tempo). Vendor proceeds to call it a feature request because the software successfully fails to show public information (visible in the UI, but HTTP 403 in the API unless you're an admin). Instead of changing one word in the code that defines the access level required for this GET call, it gets triaged as not being a bug, put on a backlog, and we never heard fro…

Successful failure is my favorite kind, I like to think that all my failures are successful

Re: Is something bugging you?

#333

Post by whstl »

hyperthesis wrote: post #264
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…

I've always thought a x10 is one who sits back and sees a simpler way - like some math problems have an easy solution, if you can see it. Also: change the question; change the context (Alan Kay) (And absolutely not brute-force grinding themselves away)

Agreed. You can brute force, but not for long.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#334

Post by yummypaint »

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.

That may be true of individual activities, but you trained in multiple. A fairer comparison would require the same people who best you in athletics to at least be comparable at math etc.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#335

Post by rzzzt »

mjevans wrote: post #259
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 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…

There was also the "Hadoop vs. unix pipeline running on a laptop"-story a few years back, a more modern take: https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

Re: Is something bugging you?

#336

Post by spartanatreyu »

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…

The article says they created a deterministic hypervisor that runs all pseudorandom behavior from a starting seed to enable perfect re-playability.

But that's all we know so far. I'm assuming there'll be some sort of fuzz testing, and static analysis or some defining actions that your software can perform.

Honestly it sounds a lot like it has a lot of crossover with what the Vale language is trying to solve: https://vale.dev/, but focused on trying to get existing software to that state instead of creating a new language to make new software already be at that state by default.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#337

Post by ramses0 »

rzzzt wrote: post #335
mjevans wrote: post #259

Earlier 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…

There was also the "Hadoop vs. unix pipeline running on a laptop"-story a few years back, a more modern take: https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

Bash-Reduce: https://github.com/sorhus/bash-reduce

Re: Is something bugging you?

#338

Post by khazhoux »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #253
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...

Literally the opposite of what makes a car go fast :-)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#339

Post by loeg »

tantaman wrote: post #254
AlienRobot wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/ )

Meta compensates all SWEs very well. To suppose arguendo that 10x types exist, I don't think they're really compensated linearly 10x more than everyone else. But yeah, certainly, if you are great at your job and want to make a bunch of money, Meta is a great employer for that.

3x bonus multiplies (Redefines Expectations) are extremely uncommon. Level increases certainly help but like, L7 only makes ~3x what L5 does -- not 10x. And there are few L7s and very few L8+.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#340

Post by idontpost »

mathgradthrow wrote: post #136
JimDabell wrote: post #132

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.

the worst engineer certainly has negative productivity, so I'm not sure that your explanation can possibly be the correct one.

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