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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#391

Post by strken »

randomdata wrote: post #146
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.

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…

Productivity in this case is performance on contrived tasks that don't represent day-to-day work well and for some of which negative score isn't possible.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#393

Post by strken »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #368
khazhoux wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it? How fast would you drive a car if I gave you the keys and told you „everything works perfectly fine, however the brakes have been removed“?

This is the kind of half-correct pithy quote which falls down at the edge cases, e.g. if you're writing an algorithm that selects the lowest-speed car for new learner drivers and for some reason a blissfully unaware learner ends up in a McLaren GT with no brakes for lesson number 1.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#395

Post by eschneider »

gryn wrote: post #352
lolinder wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

It doesn't have to be that way. Sure, if you can get a reputation for being sharp, reliable, quick to learn, and happy to work on things you haven't seen before, it's not so hard to move into completely new tech areas.

People will hire you more for your problem solving ability, reliability, and ability to work with people than your experience with any particular tech. If you've demonstrated you can pick up a new tech area easily, it's not too hard to do it again.

That sort of thing will let you build deep experience in a lot of areas and keep you current with the latest technologies. Keeps things interesting, too. :)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#396

Post by michaelcampbell »

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;…

"Don't confuse motion with action", in other words. I think a lot of people aren't good at it because they themselves are rewarded for the opposite. This seems rife in the "just above individual contributor" management layer, but that's a biased take.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#397

Post by vojev »

m3kw9 wrote: post #363

It sounds great but let’s see how it works and what are the constraints and what the UX looks loke

The UI is exposed on the website, you just have to poke around a bit. There's a link to a live report from this documentation page: https://antithesis.com/docs/reports/triage.html

Re: Is something bugging you?

#399

Post by JohnMakin »

chris_wot wrote: post #374
JohnMakin wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

What happened to him in the end?

I don’t know, eventually the working environment got too toxic and I along with two other senior engineers quit. As far as I know he’s still running his little kingdom.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#400

Post by chinchilla2020 »

amw-zero wrote: post #341
chinchilla2020 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm assuming you aren't aware of FoundationDB: https://www.foundationdb.org/files/fdb-paper.pdf Having that context puts the post in a much better perspective. It's definitely an introduction post (the company has been developing this in stealth mode for the past few years), but it is most certainly _not_ a marketing post. These people developed extremely novel testing techniques for FoundationDB and are now generali…

I have heard of it but know very little about it.

I'm reading the paper. It's very intriguing but so is the marketing material for the new Tesla. I need to work with things like this before I believe the claims.

Too many people here on HN are getting caught up in a barely-tested new technology and hailing it as some revolution.

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