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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

#181

Post by thi2 »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #167
swatcoder wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> Comforting yet false assertions. Great engineers tire of working with “normal” engineers, they want to work with others who they respect

What a great environment to train juniors. Does not sound toxic at all.

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

#182

Post by throwaway2037 »

superconduct123 wrote: post #24

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…

    > It makes me wonder, if someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?
It is hard to understand other people with freakishly high intrinsic motivation. They look like aliens to the normies.

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

#183

Post by typewithrhythm »

mjburgess wrote: post #164

The 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. W…

I've heard people talking about diversity three ways;

The first is the idealistic one that employers would like to be the default interpretation: A global hiring pool allows for the best possible experts, with the widest experience. And you need an inclusive culture to ensure that the talent is happy to stay.

The second is the more realistic: A global hiring pool allows for cheaper labour: And you need a culture where speaking out against "inclusivity" is dangerous to the individual, in order to prevent unionist sentiment or political barriers to cheap labour emerging.

The third is a bit more cynical, it's similar to the second but considering a wider scale: If an employer with an easy problem can't access a low cost low skill workforce, then they have to compete in hiring from the high skill one. This means that development is tied up with the financial impact of the work. (You only hire someone if there is expected return). Access to a cheaper labour market makes the price of the work more tied to the difficulty, removing the perception that development is a high value activity.

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

#184

Post by hot_gril »

fzeroracer wrote: post #95
incrudible wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Taking pride in your craft would mean having enough self-respect to both not burn your soul out for the sake of a corporation that wants to make you redundant and using it in a direction that directly benefits you. I've been in the industry long enough now to see those 10x engineers having pride in their work get their mindset shattered because John from financials thinks they can juice the next quarter by laying the…

Save it for myself how, ditch half the work day to go to the gym? I'm going to work 9-5 either way.

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

#185

Post by hot_gril »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #167
swatcoder wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Even before you hit big scale, there's a lot of boring work that great engineers won't want to do. And what really makes someone a great engineer is the ability to transform a hard problem to something regular engineers can handle the rest of. So I agree that 10x engineers are real and it's often 2 out of 12, but all-star teams don't work, which is why those people often get moved to run new teams/projects instead.

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

#186

Post by from-nibly »

pests wrote: post #44
gmm1990 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any open source repositories where this is an example? I keep hearing the 10x people ruin everything but I wouldn’t call that person 10x. I don’t understand how it’s objectionable that some people are more productive than others.

I have a buddy that helped me out with some DIY/construction projects. He thinks he is a 10x as well since he gets so much done so quickly. He will finish up and sit down saying its done. I go look and every tool is literally everywhere, garbage and debris thrown about, and half the stuff is incorrectly installed as he didn't think he needed to read the instructions and missed key details.

That's someone who thinks they are 10x not someone who is.

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

#187

Post by swatcoder »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #169
swatcoder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the sibling comment noted, I think you might be projecting value judgment onto value distinction.

The most salient values of the later cohort are different than those in the prior ones, and those values do track with the values we associate with those different class backgrounds.

But there's no ranking being made there. They're just different values.

The values of the new cohort have earned the industry a great deal of political, economic, and cultural influence on an international level.

The values of the old cohort didn't do that, except insofar as they built a stage for the new one. They made software differently. They designed products differently. They operated businesses on different scales. They hired differently.

Indeed some of us from the old cohort don't personally savor all the spotlight and influence and cultural drama that Silicon Valley collectively bears now, and miss the way thing were. And others love it. But that's just personal preference, not class warfare.

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

#188

Post by weitendorf »

superconduct123 wrote: post #24

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…

> if someone is so smart that they can do 10x the work, would they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and wonder why they don’t get 10x the rewards

I think this is kind of a nasty attitude. I absolutely cannot stand working with people like this. Why would you insinuate that someone is stupid because they get more done? To me it sounds like you are just insecure about others’ output, so you have to tell yourself that it’s stupid and pathetic to be fully engaged at work.

Depending on the company and person they often are compensated much more down the line when they get fancy titles or apply what they spent more time learning/practicing.

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

#189

Post by chasd00 »

yubblegum wrote: post #172
grandempire wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely attracted different people. The inflows are much larger and not the same. For example EE used to be prestige and CS was the backup. And that would never compare to finance or law.

Yes but imo this change happened no later than late 90s. I distinctly remember how suddenly it became cool to be a programmer and the 'new type' was already making changes by early '00s. And yes, the $s attracted smart people who did not embody the old hacker ethos. These are the new bloods that gifted us with surveillance tech, btw.

“Call 1-800 beageek”. Remember that commercial? That was around the time software dev went mainstream, late 90s iirc.

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

#190

Post by from-nibly »

What the heck is going on here with people's understanding of what 10x means.

Listen, a 10x engineer is someone who does the work of 10 other engineers, not closes 10 times the tickets, not pretends to do 10x the work but really it's just making things more complicated.

Sometimes being 10x means you are extremely careful and you don't have to go back and rework stuff.

Sometimes it means your work unlocks 0.1 extra value out of 100 other engineers.

You can say that 10x engineers just flat out don't exist but it's a whole lot of cope to say that someone who actually gets 10 times as much work done is actually bad because you knew one special boy that was really a disaster.

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