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Is something bugging you?

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#351

Post by JohnMakin »

sangnoir wrote: post #230
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;…

>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…

> 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,

bingo, well said. Worked on a team like this with a “principal” engineer who’d work very fast with bug-ridden work like this simply because he had the automatic blessing from on high to do whatever he wanted. My unfortunate task was to run along behind him and clean up, which to my credit I think I did a pretty good job at, but of course these types can only very rarely acknowledge/appreciate that.

Eventually he got super insecure/threatened and attempted to push me out along with whoever else he felt was a threat to his fiefdom.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#352

Post by gryn »

lolinder wrote: post #330
eschneider wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

the other factor I noticed from the days I was programming for fun vs these days where I'm programming for pay.

in those early years the tasks that you take on are probably above your skillset and fight through it, you're not accountable to anyone.

in a job you're usually hired for what you already know, +/- some margin for more gradual learning , not really that much room for moonshots. the work need to be divided into bit sized parts that you can justify to the higher-ups when needed. you have less room for exploring really non linear paths toward the solution which can be harder to explain but where you learn more.

so in the end this end up sometimes amounting to 10years of experience outside work being more impactful than 10 years at work. ,

Re: Is something bugging you?

#353

Post by koreth1 »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #238
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…

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.…

That childhood native-fluency analogy is insightful! Your experience matches mine.

I started programming at age 7 and it's true that the way code forms in my head feels similar to the way words form when I'm writing or speaking in English. In the same way that I don't stop and consciously figure out whether to use the past or present tense while I'm talking, I usually don't consciously think about, say, what kind of looping construct I'm about to use; it's just the natural-feeling way to express the idea I'm trying to convey. The idea itself is kind of already in the form of mental code in the same way that my thoughts are kind of already in English if I'm speaking.

But... maybe that's how it is for everyone, even people who learned later? I only know how it is in my own head.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#354

Post by umvi »

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…

Reminds me of the inventer of the blue LED (see recent veritasium video)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#355

Post by harshaw »

I am really intrigued by organizations that build effective test cultures. I am not interested in people who have testing teams (ala how it was done before, say 2004) or teams that simply do unit tests and integration tests. I am interested in people who realized that building the right testing culture is key to their success. Before reading this article sqlite would probably be my top reference. I don't have the article handy, but the sqlite developers spend like a year building a test framework to make incredibly bulletproof software. I wasn't aware of foundationDB before but the idea of the simulation engine - that's exactly what most distributed systems folks need.

disclaimer - I work at AWS. And we have a combination of TLA+, fuzz, and simulation testing. When I first started it was obvious my team had a huge testing gap. It pains me to say this but for a big part of AWS testing is sort of an after thought. It comes from the "we don't hire test engineers" mentality I suppose - but this likely differs wildly by team. Over the years we've tried to backfill the gap with simulators. But it is really hard to do this culturally. because it is really hard while you are trying to build new stuff, fix bugs, etc. And your entire team (and leaders) have to be bought into the foundational value of this infrastructure. And because we don't have it, we write COEs, we fix the obvious bugs, but do we take the 1 year it would take to avoid all problems in the future - no. So yeah I am super jealous of your "fully-deterministic event-based network simulation".

Re: Is something bugging you?

#356

Post by rvnx »

samatman wrote: post #60
rvnx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be the opposite of the product: For a software not interacting with the real world, there is only one possibility for frame N+1, if you know the state of a system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism PRNG are illusions, just misunderstood by humans.

Did you intend to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_algorithm ?

No, it is a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon - Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

(if you know the state of a system + all the rules then you can know the next state)

and determinism actually applies way beyond just algorithms.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#358

Post by mianos »

whstl wrote: post #325
theamk wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

have hired five interns and five experienced developers. Some of the interns exceeded expectations, while some of the experienced developers also performed well.

The top-performing experienced developers outshone all the graduates. However, the less effective experienced developers were on par with the graduates, showing no significant difference in performance.

The takeaway for me is that simple anecdotes are not very informative. Over time and with a larger sample size, experienced individuals tend to perform better. Nonetheless, some graduates will also become exceptionally skilled.

Graduates are more cost-effective. Experienced professionals require less oversight. If they need substantial guidance, they don't truly qualify as senior, as opposed to their resume that says, at 25 they have been a CTO for 10 years).

Re: Is something bugging you?

#359

Post by lukan »

whstl wrote: post #331
t-3 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

Well sure, if you compare a master to a novice, there is almost always a great difference. But between masters of carpentry, there is usually not so much difference. But here with the 10x trope it is supposed to be different and I would say indeed, but it is not as common as many would like to think.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#360

Post by randomdata »

esafak wrote: post #350
randomdata wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is the introduction of productivity. The 10x developer originated from a study that measured performance . The 10x developer being able to do a task in a 10th of the time is quite conceivable and reflects what the study found. I'm sure we've all seen a developer take 10 hours to do a job that would take another developer just 1 hour. Nobody is doing it in negative hours, so the math works. But perfor…

Measuring productivity like that in technology makes no sense because our work is not fungible; what and how we do it matters as much as how fast we do it. Time-based productivity measurement is for factory workers stamping out widgets. So in our revenue-based world, negative productivity makes sense.

> productivity

Performance. That is what the study that found a 10x performance difference observed. There is no mention of productivity in the study. If anyone has tried to study productivity, they most certainly have not come up with a 10x moniker. It seems productivity was mentioned in this thread only because it also happens to start with the letter 'p' and someone got confused.

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