I think a lot of it depends on what domain you are in. If you're competing to build the world's best AI model, then you better have a lot of 10x engineers working for you. But if you're building some boring, niche SaaS app, then you better know how to get the most out of normal engineers.
“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
191–200 of 543 posts
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#192I 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…
In my 40 years of professional software development, rarely have I seen such an uninformed post. And ignorant. Did I mention ignorant? I've been the "10x" developer, multiple times. And there certainly are poor performers and exceptional performers, but great teams makes great software, not great individuals. The analogies are numerous. You can look at a great (american) football team and see the Quarterback as the 10x programmer, but only if you ignore everyone else on the team that allows the QB to shine. Same with software. Software is a team sport, and if you don't get that, you should get that.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#193I'm sure everyone has worked with engineers who might be 10x on their own but drag the team down being inflexible or insisting on solving the wrong problem.
I like the saying that "engineering is a team sport" and agree that the multiplier should be on the productivity of the entire team as mentioned in the article. The concept of whole being greater than the sum of its parts applies to both engineering systems and technical teams (which we'd probably say is a type of system on its own).
Not meaning to downplay the role of great engineers... I suppose the best scenario would be 10x engineers who can also help the rest of the team perform better.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#194Earlier 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.
Back in the 90s, they were the “suits”.
Andreessen, Scott McNealy, & Ellison were, to me, the ones that left a particularly bad taste.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#195Earlier 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?
It was somewhat common in the 1970s and before for programming languages to support abbreviating variable names when you referenced them. So for example, you could say
patients = 400
x = pat / 2
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#196Won’t be getting imposter syndrome for sure for this role
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#197Earlier 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…
Every team doesn't need to have "great" engineers; I don't want "clever" solutions to my bog standard business application, just people to write sane, clean and maintainable code.
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#198Engineering work, like many other branches of intellectual work, does not have many of the properties of other jobs. So I don't share the ideal of a normal engineer doing normal work in their office hours.
I also don't buy into the 10x pushback, there's not only 10x engineers, there's 100x engs. Easy to prove, can you think of an engineer that adds negative value? That deletes tests, or breaks stuff? That adds left-pad to package.json? Or log4j? The bigger the org the bigger the damage. Boom, you have a -1x engineer, and conversely a +1x engineer. If they do a lot of damage that's a -10x engineer. If they do some damage and contribute a little bit maybe they can get into positive numbers, and you have a 0.1x engineer, therefore there exist 10x engineers (and 100x and 1000x and inf and -10x engineers.)
I do agree that performance is not quantifiable (or very hard to quantify) and that it is not a property of an engineer ( although the article suggests performance is a variable of teams or the org, but I would say it's a property of the engineer-product pair)
Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams
#199I 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…
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