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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

#201

Post by N_Lens »

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW wrote: post #96
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.

If this were true then software engineering jobs would have all already been offshored. Software is much closer to a competitive race where small improvements in ability give completely outsized returns.

You're both right, but in different contexts.

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

#202

Post by noisy_boy »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #182
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.

Maybe because they enjoy the work they do because they love programming and are very happy that they are getting paid well, relative to most professions, for their hobby? Sample size of 1 tho.

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

#203

Post by TZubiri »

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…

I like to think of my ideal mythological 10x as someone that does less.

What would a 10x engineer do at any of these companies pushing bloat in their products? How do you keep the software clean even as it becomes successful, millions of dollars and jobs change the ethos of your organization, but you are tasked with preser ving.

A 10x engineer at msft would have avoided notepad being modified.

A 10x engineer knows how to stop the forces that be, from adding an "ai" feature, where it clearly doesn't belong.

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

#204

Post by TZubiri »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #56
strangattractor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you 10x'd in wrong direction. Doesn't mean something else can't 10x in the right direction.

If they 10x in the wrong direction and I 1x in the wrong direction, I am a 10x engineer.

A null engineer is an inf engineer.

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

#205

Post by TZubiri »

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 think multiple 10x engineers will fight amongst themselves, and that is good.

You don't have a 10x without there being a 0.1x engineer. And we can't all be right.

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

#206

Post by weitendorf »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #117

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…

I think this varies a lot with the type of software you’re building and composition of the team. If you are making a very typical CRUD web app in a structured environment (eg a shop that cranks these out one after another, or with strong project/product managers and designers who do a good job speccing things out) you do not need some rockstar 10xer to get it shipped. In fact, that kind of environment might bore or not be rewarding enough for someone like that to stick around even if they do show up.

But you still need people to actually care about their work and get it done even when it’s not “hard”. Someone who could be a solid engineer on one team could be a “10xer” on another team just from caring about the project and consistently putting in the hours on it, if their team is mostly coasting by doing the bare minimum or highly underskilled. In fact I think many so-called 10xers may just be solid engineers who found themselves in workplaces with a culture of “not my problem” or “I can probably stretch this ticket out a few weeks”.

Conversely if you take someone who might be a wizard on one team and drop them into some super complex “engineering catnip” project they might just be seen as a solid engineer there. I think cases like that demonstrate the author’s point pretty well: if you design the project’s processes and tooling around the wizard’s wizards who eg dont use debuggers because they have some insane skill with tracing running binaries you are missing out on the productivity you might gain from the less skilled engineers.

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

#207

Post by mbernstein »

TZubiri wrote: post #198

Engineering 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-p…

These are terrible examples that don't prove a single thing. Babel, Webpack, and React all used leftpad as dependencies. Blaming someone for using an Apache project is absurd.

Here's my pointless randomly made up on the spot anecdote - you're more likely to write a vulnerability in your own logging system than being impactedby using a widely adopted opensource one.

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

#209

Post by TZubiri »

steveBK123 wrote: post #87
Nevermark wrote: post #75

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.

Yes but it will never reach production.

A 10x engineer that pushes a problem to prod is not a 10x. You get to 10x by not making mistakes, any issue you create sets you back ten squares.

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

#210

Post by djeastm »

TZubiri wrote: post #198

Engineering 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-p…

>Easy to prove, can you think of an engineer that adds negative value? That deletes tests, or breaks stuff?

No. Have you really worked with someone that did this and they weren't fired?

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