Do people really question the existence of "10x engineers". It follows from Pareto distribution that some people are just exceptionally productive. That doesn't mean that its good or beneficial (depending on what the scope is). That also doesn't mean that its good to only have them, because they often carry their own baggage.
“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
161–170 of 543 posts
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#162I 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…
Look at it from the perspective of a scared business owner who wants replaceable cogs
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a discipline, it's just very fast-growing. Many techniques remain and become classics, it just takes awhile to realize what is fad vs classical.
Can you give some examples of things you'd consider fads versus classical in software?
The answers so far are pretty damn telling.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#164The author:
> Charity Majors is cofounder and CTO at Honeycomb.io, a platform that helps engineering teams debug and improve their software applications.
> https://charity.wtf/ Blog, latest article an apologia for DEI, "The diversity of your teams over the long run rests on your ability to build an inclusive culture and equitable policies."... "Don’t underestimate what a competitive advantage diversity can be"
Hmm. Why does no one argue for equitable balance of political views, or religions, or anything to do with ideas at all? Is anyone even measuring ideational diversity? Power-sharing in most countries is principally concerned with it, for example. How many 'inclusive' teams are extremely politically, and ideologically, homogenous?
Clearly there's a apologia for a certain worldview at work here: some sunk-cost investment in a certain notion of inclusion, which is entails (if not aims for) moral and ideological uniformity. Offensive to this notion of 'inclusion' is excellence, since excellence isn't uniform nor even normal -- it's pareto distributed. An excellent runner is exponentially better than a normal one, and sampling uniformly from all groups ("inclusively") produces bad runners.
According to experience, and all evidence, the best talent arises out of healthy competition and cooperation with the best talent -- it does not arise out of uniform, nor even, normal distributions.
If you sample uniformly, then race all against all eventually a powerlaw arises -- and almost everyone is excluded if you want the best. Discrimination based on talent is a ruthless process which cares little for what ought be.
Yes, systems produce excellence by exaggeration of abilities, but this process of exaggeration quickly leaves the normal behind, and is anyhting but inclusive.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#165I 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…
> well known toxic field, finance
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#166I 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…
The do work, at 10x efficiency. Or maybe I misunderstood the 10x engineer idea all along! 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…
It’s been described before that this mythical unicorn is instead 10% more efficient- as well as works 10% harder, does 10% more of the right things (e.g. less waste), understands everything 10% better… the multipliers stack. You get the idea.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#167I 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…
There's truth to what you're saying, but just as in sports teams, you ultimately need a certain number of players to play the game and exceptional people characteristically have an ego that only allows so many of them in the locker room. If you have too many, they get starved for the individual recognition and validation they're used to receiving, leading to crises and clashes and quittings. Unless your project's sca…
Comforting yet false assertions. Great engineers tire of working with “normal” engineers, they want to work with others who they respect. A team of only great engineers can have a completely different culture than a team of “normal engineers”. Teams of great engineers are magnets that attract others. Building a great team weirdly does not become harder over time, as your project is derisked you get access to larger and larger pools of talent. Talent concentration pays an enormous dividend and is a worthy investment. Maybe things change when you hit like Facebook/google scale, but at that point… we’ve won anyway, wouldn’t be arguing online anymore.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#168Do people really question the existence of "10x engineers". It follows from Pareto distribution that some people are just exceptionally productive. That doesn't mean that its good or beneficial (depending on what the scope is). That also doesn't mean that its good to only have them, because they often carry their own baggage.
People disagree on what it looks like. If you think it’s an engineer who types 10x more lines of code, or makes 10x less bugs, there is someone ready to argue that person doesn’t exist or is actually a boat anchor.
Once you define it as an engineer who ships 10x as much business impact (ships fewer bugs, builds the right features, etc), it’s less contested but also less glamorous and harder to measure. In fact you start to develop an inkling that such people may not even be the same coders you once idolized.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is [software engineering vs business development] and how to approach it [optimal solution vs soonest deliverable]. You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the…
This post is so weird on so many levels. I'll focus on this part:
> You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.
As a reminder: Bill Gates, who is certainly old school tech, was born and raised in an objectively wealthy, well-connected family, then went to Harvard. This is nearly made-for-TV silver spoon stuff.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#170> “10x engineer” makes it sound like productivity is an immutable characteristic of a person.
Because it is. Traits like intelligence or dedication really fluctuate during person's lifetime.
> If you have services or software components that are owned by a single engineer, that person is a single point of failure.
If you have a service owned by a person, you have a single entity responsible for this service. If you have a team of 10 people owning a service, each person gives only one tenth of a fuck, making any change take ten times as much time as it should, and there are ten different visions of the project playing out at once.
> The best engineering organizations are the ones where normal engineers can do great work
Strong agree. As an 10x engineer in an organization of 1x engineers, my life is perfect, because I get my shit done in one hour and go home and nobody gives a fuck. In an environment of 10x engineers I'd need to actually work 40h a week.
> Build sociotechnical systems with “normal people” in mind
Valid point. My manager asks me how do I do this that I deliver projects on time, they work correctly, and people are happy to work with me. The answer is simple: I treat everyone like an incompetent lazy fuck. This assumption allows me to create designs that are much less likely to fail.
You can see example of this by studying how big tech works. Usually they replace individual creativity with processes for people who can't think.
> A great engineering organization is one where you don’t have to be one of the best engineers in the world to have a lot of impact.
Not possible. Either you're a 10x engineer, or you're a cog in a big machine. Can't eat a cake and have a cake.
> Don’t hire the “best” people. Hire the right people
This paragraph is just ChatGPT slop.