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“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#71

Post by CrimsonRain »

n_ary wrote: post #12
nullpoint420 wrote: post #4

Most 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 believe, you have got the multipliers switched. Most 1x engineers/developers care deeply about users and the end product, and also likes to keep the code well maintained and performant, so they can do their peaceful work and go home, while not making the life of the user any more miserable. Most 10x engineers are too brilliant and remain busy rocking the boat and doing so many mind blowing things at any given time…

Most "1x" engineers are a drag on the business. Complacent. Don't care about business goals.

And the 10x you mentioned are not 10x. They are 1x with frenzy.

If one is not multiplying the team output, they are simply 1x or lower (maybe a few exceptions)

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#72

Post by tkahnoski »

noosphr wrote: post #51
jaggederest wrote: post #5

I 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…

Software is different. All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space. Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly peripheral fo…

I think maybe this misses the mark. Yes software can lead to unbounded complexity unlikely many physics based engineering disciplines.

However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software systems against real world constraints. We can judge its efficiency and breaking points.

What's very different is the cost to change the system to do something new and that's where this unbounded complexity blows up in our face.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#73

Post by shafyy »

noosphr wrote: post #51
jaggederest wrote: post #5

I 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…

Software is different. All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space. Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly peripheral fo…

I don't know, man. Your comment is neither here nor there.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#74

Post by lalaithion »

vrnvu wrote: post #36

> 10x engineers have dark backgrounds, are rarely seen doing user-interface work, and are poor mentors and interviewers If you think a great (10x) engineer has bad social skills, isn’t a good mentor, and isn’t a strong teammate… you’ve never actually worked with one. What truly makes someone a great engineer is being technically impeccable and having next-level soft skills.

I once worked with a 10x engineer who I could hand new backend APIs to and have a brand new ui component that supported the behavior in less than a day, consistently. I have worked with 10x engineers who spend hours on calls walking junior engineers through problems they're having. That's part of being a 10x engineer – what this article is talking about is random 1x engineers with a chip on their shoulder and unshakeable arrogance.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#75

Post by Nevermark »

n_ary wrote: post #12
nullpoint420 wrote: post #4

Most 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 believe, you have got the multipliers switched. Most 1x engineers/developers care deeply about users and the end product, and also likes to keep the code well maintained and performant, so they can do their peaceful work and go home, while not making the life of the user any more miserable. Most 10x engineers are too brilliant and remain busy rocking the boat and doing so many mind blowing things at any given time…

Someone imagining they are brilliant doesn’t make them brilliant.

More so if in the light of day their work sucks.

Discussions about 10x engineers are not about “wannabe 10x engineers”.

—

I have yet to come across an intellectual area where there isn’t a long tail of higher talent.

As the “x” goes up they just get more rare in reality, and even rarer to see. Because they are not always being optimally challenged. Most problems are mundane. And optimally challenging workers isn’t really a business plan for anything.

I think there is such thing as a 10x problem, which you have to find before your 10x engineer really shines. Identifying hard but exceptionally valuable problems to solve takes 10x vision. And time and luck.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#76

Post by rqmedes »

ultra-boss wrote: post #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.

And who leads and sets the vision. A committee of “average” engineers?

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#77

Post by incrudible »

booleandilemma wrote: post #41
behrlich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely obsessed with the project, like it’s their main hobby/purpose I think you figured it out.

If your main hobby or purpose is to make someone else rich you're a slave.

Imagine taking pride in your craft rather than doing only the bare minimum to pad your ego, what a crazy approach!

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#78

Post by logsr »

strangattractor wrote: post #22
jaggederest wrote: post #5

I 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…

I was once considered a 10X. I would work all night. Rewrite code simply because I found it objectionable - lots of things I'd never do now. Mostly after working those long hours I return after a long rest and spend most of my time fixing all the new and ridiculous problems I created while working tired. Things may have gotten done a little faster. Never once did it even matter - there was no material benefit to the…

> Focus is a super power

this is crucial. from my own productivity I know that I can function at 1X or 10X depending on my focus.

being a great engineer requires practice most of all, and the consistency of focus during that practice will impact its value.

in my experience, engineering is all about efficiency, and as i have developed over time the scope of factors i take into account when calculating the efficiency of something has increased. in the beginning i only looked at the technical details of the implementation, and then over time that expanded to considering maintainability, team co-ordination, business objectives, etc.

the potential scope here is unlimited. when you start, just making something compile takes all of your focus, but over time as programming becomes reflexive you are able to expand the factors you take into account far beyond the immediate code, and it seems trivial by comparison.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#79

Post by noosphr »

tkahnoski wrote: post #72
noosphr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software is different. All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space. Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly peripheral fo…

I think maybe this misses the mark. Yes software can lead to unbounded complexity unlikely many physics based engineering disciplines. However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software systems against real world constraints. We can judge its…

>However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software systems against real world constraints. We can judge its efficiency and breaking points.

This is a common sense view of computation that's unfortunately wrong.

The simplest counter example is the busy beaver program: with as little as 12 states we have saturated the computational capabilities of the universe, but it looks completely safe and sane for the first few states you would be testing against.

You may call it pathological, and you'd be right, but the point is that you never know under which rug a function that takes more computation than the universe can supply is hiding.

By comparison power electronics engineers don't have to formally prove that they didn't accidentally include a nuclear power plant in their e-scooter design.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#80

Post by rqmedes »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #65

When did IEEE become host to clickbait nonsense? This whole take feels like an editorial by a junior engineer going off vibes. It's all off-base, from the misunderstanding of how to measure productivity, to what output matters, to the idea that there is such a thing as a "normal" software engineer. It's kind of embarrassing.

Best take so far
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