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Is something bugging you?

antithesis.com

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#401

Post by throw4847285 »

giantg2 wrote: post #92
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'm tired of hearing about 10x engineers. I just want to be a good 1x engineer. Or good at anything in life realy.

I feel you. I had a semi-traumatic experience at a previous job, combined with a number of other factors which have left me feeling like a shell of my former self. Now I'm sure if I'm working at .5x or if I feel like .5x. Such is life, at times.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#402

Post by throw4847285 »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #114
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…

No one reading this during the hours of 9-5 is a 10x.

Not true. I've known some very ADHD developers who are constantly context shifting and are able to fuck around on Hackernews for a while and then suddenly knock out a huge amount of work. The problem is that (speaking from personal experience) everybody with ADHD thinks they can do this and 99% cannot.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#403

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

The 10x developer I know basically DOES seem to do 10x more than anyone else on our team. But they are working on a team that does relatively simple work and are by far the most senior person on that team.

It's like how an NBA player would be a 10x player on a college basketball team. Great to work with them but If I was in their shoes I don't know how enjoyable/engaging the work would be.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#404

Post by AlwaysRock »

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…

Sure. A cohesive team of employees who stick together for more than 2 years is so rare. They can be so much more productive than a group of talented people who rotate a new person in and out every 3-6 months.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#405

Post by QuercusMax »

davedx wrote: post #390
QuercusMax wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I started learning how to write a Makefile when I was around 15, and I learned all about using tabs. My colleagues didn't touch Make until they were 25 and were extremely confused.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#406

Post by catskul2 »

nlavezzo wrote: post #342
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…

I'd suggest taking a dive into the docs - there is quite a lot there that should address some of these questions. That said, Antithesis doesn't require you to write manual tests, integration or otherwise. It requires your software system to be packaged in containers, which is fairly straightforward, and then requires a workload to be written which will emulate the normal functioning of the software system. So for exa…

IMO "Read the docs" is not a reasonable response to "what is it?"

Typically someone wants to know the most basic question before devoting time to diving into the docs.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#407

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

strken wrote: post #388
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...

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.

Sure enough. Presumably my brain was switched off if I added that "correction" myself.

Or it was already there in whatever source I managed to copy it from. No idea.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#408

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

koreth1 wrote: post #353
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally get the same sense that I'm just "communicating" using code. I just write out the code that expresses the concepts I have in my head.

And at least some people clearly don't. I was talking to one guy who said that even for a simple for-each loop it was way faster for him to "Google the code he needs and modify it" than to write it. This boggled me. I couldn't imagine being able to Google and parse results and find the one I wanted and copy and paste it and modify it being faster than just writing the code.

Even famous developers brag about their inability to code. DHH (RoR developer) has a tweet where he brags that he couldn't code a bubble sort without Googling it. A nested loop with a single compare and swap...and he's "proud" of the fact that he needs to Google it?

I have no words.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#409

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

whstl wrote: post #326
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People are also prone to love doing things that they're good at, so it's hard to know which came first. :)

Re: Is something bugging you?

#410

Post by happytiger »

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…

Did you go build your own company? You totally should with a story like that.
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