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Is something bugging you?

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Re: Is something bugging you?

#411

Post by 6510 »

KuriousCat wrote: post #223
didgetmaster wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is the sad part of it, many people without core competence end up in "leadership" positions and remove any "perceived" threats to their authority. I believe part of it is due to the absence of leadership training in the engineering curriculum. Colleges should encourage engineers to take up few leadership courses and get them trained on things like Influence and Power.

Knowing the difference between an overly ambitious or technically wrong proposal and when to listen to the engineer seems impossible at times. Perhaps it requires a consultant.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#412

Post by whstl »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #409
whstl wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

That's true!!!

Re: Is something bugging you?

#414

Post by jimbokun »

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…

And this is the single biggest reason why good developers become managers.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#415

Post by eevmanu »

nlavezzo wrote: post #67
candiddevmike wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> quite possibly the only distributed database out there that lives up to its strict serializability claims Jepsen has never tested FoundationDB, not sure why you claim this and link to Jepsen's site.

FDB co-founder here. Aphyr / Jepsen never tested FDB because, as he tweeted "their testing appears to be waaaay more rigorous than mine." We actually put a screen cap of that tweet in the blog post linked here.

Just a heads-up for anyone diving deeper into this thread - I dug into the original tweet and managed to track down the parent tweet right here: [1]. Moreover, there's a snapshot on archive.org [2] capturing the reply along with the quote in question. Interestingly, there's also a snapshot from foundationdb.com [3] that discusses the outcomes of running Jepsen tests on FDB. Worth checking out for those interested in the technical nitty-gritty.

[1]: https://twitter.com/obfuscurity/status/405016890306985984

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20220805112242/https://twitter.c...

[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150325003526/http://blog.found...

Re: Is something bugging you?

#416

Post by jimbokun »

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…

> 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.

This is a relatively small part of it.

The majority of developers who have been programming for 20 years, maybe learned a few tricks along the way then got stuck in a local maximum.

There are a few who learn deep computer science principles and understand how to apply them to novel problems. I'm thinking of techniques like in this book:

https://www.everand.com/book/282526076/Paradigms-of-Artifici...

(mainly because Peter Norvig is my goto as the paradigmatic 10x developer)

For example, in the Efficiency Issues chapter about how to optimize programs, Norvig lists writing a compiler from one language into a more efficient one. Most developers who have been working 20 years, either won't think of that, or understand how to implement it. But these are the kinds of things that can result in really outsize productivity gains.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#417

Post by jimbokun »

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 :/

The new core question for interviewers to answer is "why should I hire you over ChatGPT?" If you are just going to take the requirements and copy paste them into ChatGPT, I could do that myself just as fast and you aren't adding any value.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#418

Post by jimbokun »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #72
jollyllama wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That rings true and is probably why the 10x engineers I have seen usually work on devops or modify the framework the other devs are using in some way. For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved.

> For example, an engineer who speeds up a build or test suite by an order of magnitude is easily a 10x engineer in most organizations, in terms of man hours saved. Yeah but this isn't something scalable that can happen regularly as part of your job description. Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis. It's usually…

> Like most jobs/companies don't have so many low hanging fruits to pick that someone can speed of build by orders of magnitude on a weekly basis.

But then you just move on to the next highest leverage task.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#419

Post by KuriousCat »

6510 wrote: post #411
KuriousCat wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sad part of it, many people without core competence end up in "leadership" positions and remove any "perceived" threats to their authority. I believe part of it is due to the absence of leadership training in the engineering curriculum. Colleges should encourage engineers to take up few leadership courses and get them trained on things like Influence and Power.

Knowing the difference between an overly ambitious or technically wrong proposal and when to listen to the engineer seems impossible at times. Perhaps it requires a consultant.

In my experience working for several companies, people who know and are not merely acting out of fear can call things out and explain why something is wrong or ambitious. And more often than not sensible engineers get it. Consultants are usually called in by the leadership when they can't deal with the backlash or have no core competence in the first place.

Re: Is something bugging you?

#420

Post by 20after4 »

eschneider wrote: post #395
gryn wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The challenge becomes editing down the resume. Mine is something like 5 or 6 pages even after some paring down. That's still probably way too long.
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