121–130 of 543 posts
I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B pl…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Mos…
You really can over-hire and I've seen it happen in many shops If a "10x engineer" is not given 10x problems, they will.. create some.
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…
The methodology is unconstrained as another way to put it. Which, indeed, is different from engineering where constraints are non-negotiable, and thus the methodology as well. I think a lot of people doing functional programming, as an example, enjoy the constraints and the discipline that it imbues on their craft.
Then marketing come along and ask to make it a trilogy and a few weeks before release they ask you to add in Ewoks because it'll sell more toys.
I think 10x is an exaggeration but I've found its really common to have 1-2 people who do a big bulk of the work The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work. I get it if you're a founder of a startup but not if you're at a big company Yet every big company I've worked at there are always 1-2 people on…
I think 10x is an exaggeration but I've found its really common to have 1-2 people who do a big bulk of the work The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why they care so much about work when the rewards are not proportionate to doing so much extra work. I get it if you're a founder of a startup but not if you're at a big company Yet every big company I've worked at there are always 1-2 people on…
And that efficiency can translate in 10x output, but it's not guaranteed.
My opinion on the 10x engineer principle, always was that these people have their best development/debug environment setup. And they can traverse, run, and explore code faster than most. Like world record pizza makers in under a minute.
Through my career I've seen some engineers that were stumbling their way around their tooling after years of use, and some that weren't even touch typing. Factor that in.
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…
Disagree. What makes software unique to other engineering disciplines is that it isn't a discipline at all. What makes software so great is how quick the iteration cycles are. Software sits at a higher abstraction level than physical hardware, so much of our time is spent throwing at the wall and seeing what sticks because that's often (although not always) the best use of time.
I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B pl…
Get rid of team members that make your life harder. Keep the ones that make it easier.
> Individuals ship software not teams
I can’t see how this is remotely true outside of contorting some definitions of “ship”.
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>These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. Didn't we pass the rubicon on that in the early 2010s? I personally don't feel that its "like" finance but that its the exact same behaviors from the exact same set of people. Once tech stopped being a bunch of nerds in a basement and started being a source of wealth and power, it…
I don't think it "attracted" a certain kind of people, I think the people who were already in tech just became more wealthy and powerful, and that, predictably, brought out the worst in some. The worst qualities of "tech" people can be conflated but I think have a different flavor than the worst qualities of "finance" people. It's really just the same obnoxious behavior you can spot in young tech people. Some people…
For example EE used to be prestige and CS was the backup. And that would never compare to finance or law.
Every 10x engineer I've known has carried entire teams of normal engineers. ymmv but I've seen probably 5 instances of this and 0 instances of teams of normal engineers being super productive.
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…