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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#381

Post by morgante »

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…

It's not just that people get pushed out of IC work, but everyone tends to have less energy as they get older + other life demands accumulate.

The combination of 10-15 years of experience and the energy/time of 20s is very powerful.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#382

Post by whstl »

lukan wrote: post #359
whstl wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps there aren’t that many non-master carpenters (I don’t think that’s true, there’s plenty of professional incompetents), but I am 100% sure that not all professional developers are “masters”.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#383

Post by whstl »

mianos wrote: post #358
whstl wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

I’m not complaining about the quality of seniors I hire or comparing them to interns.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#384

Post by TrackerFF »

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…

Was it 50x productivity due to 10x engineers, or 50x productivity due to optimized company structure? (edit: obviously, these do not need to be mutually exclusive - it's a sum of all the different parts)

It's easy to bog down even the best Nx engineers if you keep them occupied with endless bullshit tasks, meetings, (ever) changing timelines, and all that.

Kind of like having a professional driver drive a sportscar through a racetrack, versus the streets of Boston.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#386

Post by hef19898 »

mettamage wrote: post #173
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…

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…

The real problem is the measurement: speed of coding (or doing any other job) or volume of worl done. Those two are actually really bad productivity measures.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#387

Post by jongjong »

Reminds me of my work in the blockchain space. I built a Decentralized Exchange which gets all of its inputs from blockchain data. Since all the inputs are deterministic (and it's all based in block time instead of real time), I can replay any scenario any number of times... But it goes one step further than what is mentioned in the article because I can replay any bug which ever happens, exactly as it happened, IN PRODUCTION.

The output is also deterministic so all operations are idempotent; they can be replayed any number of times, going as far back in the past as you want and end up with exactly the same state.

But, ironically, the DEX hasn't had any bug since it started operating 3 years ago... It makes debugging so easy, I was able to resolve every possible issue I could imagine before the launch.

I think I haven't updated the code in a year but I've been running it this whole time and it's been processing trades.

Another unusual feature is that you could technically trade between 2 blockchains while the DEX is offline... Even if the DEX is only restarted 1 year or decades later, it will resolve the trades as though the DEX had been online the entire time. Only difference is that the disbursement of funds will be in the future after the DEX is restarted.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#388

Post by strken »

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...

This is unrelated to the excellent story, but it's annoying that the repost has the following "correction":

> The manager of Charles has by now [become] tired of seeing him goof off.

"The manager has tired of Charles" is as correct as "the manager has become tired of Charles". To tire is a verb. The square bracket correction is unnecessary and arguably makes the sentence worse.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#389

Post by lysecret »

Hmmm, so this excited me a great deal since I spent some time building a property-based testing system for a trading execution engine. (Which really can't have any issues). It's an agent-based system with many possible race conditions.

Now, having built such a system (and being incredibly happy with it). I do not understand where antithesis comes in.

Broadly there were 2 components:

1. A random strategy that gives random commands that are distributed in a very specific way.

2. Properties to test, observing the system (by listening to the messages) and checking them for some properties (like positions always being correctly protected etc..)

Now, there is not much else (besides random trading data which is very easy to do or you can use actual live data). And all of them depend to 99% on domain knowledge. Now, where is there space for a company/generic framework to come in? I'm genuinely curious.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#390

Post by davedx »

QuercusMax wrote: post #183
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…

Yup, that's been my experience as someone who asked for a C++ compiler for my 12th birthday, worked on a bunch of random websites and webapps for friends of the family, and spent some time at age 16-17 running a Beowulf cluster and attempting to help postdocs port their code to run on MPI (with mixed success). All thru my CS education I was writing tons of toy programs, contributing (as much as I could) toward OSS, r…

Yeah similar story here. Basically if you start programming 10y before your peers of the same age then it’s logical you’ll be more productive and knowledgeable. Maybe a lot of “10x engineers” are just guys who gave themselves a huge head start for whatever reason
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