“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
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“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
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Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#2"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week."
plus plus plus plus plus to this.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#3"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week." plus plus plus plus plus to this.
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Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#4Most 10x engineers I've met are usually very creative and care deeply about the user experience and keeping code maintainable over time.
Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#5I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field.
These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor.
It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the rest of your life, and working "extreme" hours is both a bad policy and a bad sign that the system you're operating in is brittle. Nothing that we do is so unique that another competent engineer shouldn't be able to fill in for you when you are having an off day.
The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an almost absurd degree.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#6I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…
Couldn't agree more. I read a book (okay, I half read a book...I couldn't finish it, it was so bad) where the author (a marketer!) argued that software engineers are the most skeptical audience, and I was like, "Um, have you ever met an investigative journalist? Or people in the many many other professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking?"
The sooner the software engineering field can be rid of its beliefs about the inherent brilliance of programmers, the better for everyone involved. Inlcuding software engineers!
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#7Most 10x engineers I've met are usually very creative and care deeply about the user experience and keeping code maintainable over time. Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has led to conflict.
I like 5x developers that get the job done and don’t spend the additional 5x over engineering the work — causing the 1x engineers to disengage.
Some engineers have an obsessive, sometimes compulsive, nature which is actually at odds with the business. These types usually spent a large amount of time in institutionalized learning settings and will be far more opinionated about how their labor is allocated.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#8"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week." plus plus plus plus plus to this.
This is the key message in my opinion. I've worked with wonderful software developers who can accomplish far more than others (as well as a few who are a net drain on the team.) The key is to craft an organization that allows anyone with a minimum skillset to be successful. At least on the team that I'm currently in, this means a well-defined organization with clearly defined limits of what they should and should not do. This is with respect to customers and also internally.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#9"Measuring productivity is fraught and imperfect"
For the moment, but it's better than it's ever been, and it's getting better.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#10What ratio of time spent coding to time spent doing code review is conventional in industry, anyway?
If it is around 1 (which doesn’t seem too unreasonable given that multiple people might review a single commit), and a 10x engineer really is 10x as productive as a normal one, then I guess a team of less than 10 people will have trouble keeping up with these 10x engineers.
Unless the company only hires 10x engineers. But then we should at least consider the possibility that they are just hiring 1x engineers, and have a low opinion of engineers outside the company.