There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones • Hacker News Board

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#111

Post by nnq » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 8:08 AM UTC

Because nobody wants to be called or to call himself a 1/10 developer! It's goddamn demeaning!

And we're all at different points on the learning curves for different technologies, so we are all "1/10 developers" for some techs! But if you get the "1/10 developer" label for a technology that you end up working with but you've never touched before so you're running in the "learn on the job" mode, some will tend to mindlessly generalize this and you'll end up with a "1/10" label on your head, and you never want that, especially if you're also freelancing or doing independent consulting and your "fame" has financial consequences!. You just label the pro/experienced/uberproductive guys as 10x and leave the others to learn and perfect, it has the same "positive" effect that having a "like" button and not a "dislike" one (or both) has on social networking sites. (Now , having "learn on the job" guys working at 1/10 productivity is horrible for the customer, but this is how it works and how you get paid for learning instead of paying for learning by going to a top notch university and/or crawling through badly paid internships - as wise men said, "paying customers get shafted every now and then", but this is how we keep learning and keep our jobs fun :))

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#112

Post by zem » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 8:13 AM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #94

moe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My latest irritation is manager types getting too obsessed with Unit testing, it reminds of XML and the way it was abused. It's a bit of a tangent but I've also observed this. So much that I've started calling it the "cucumber-complex". Once infected the team not only writes excessive unit-tests to validate things like that a method-call to 'foo' does indeed call the method 'foo'. But they also wrap these unit-tests…

I wouldn't be so quick to write off Cucumber et al. A few benefits: - Sometimes business users will contribute and use these scripts (admittedly in only some teams and less often than supporters would claim); - They help with analysis and design as you are forced to question exactly what behaviour you would like to acheive; - They keep the developer focused on the feature rather than, for instance, building some big…

the most important bit, i think, is that a cucumber test suite is documentation that cannot go out of date, because if it does your test breaks and you have to fix it, thereby updating the documentation aspect of it.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#113

Post by dasil003 » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 8:16 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #75

DannyBee wrote: post #4

There is no offer of proof for the claim that there are no 10x developers past claiming "they've not seen it in practice" I have seen them with my own eyes. They are in fact, able to do things 10x faster than others. There are not a huge number of them, but they exist. At Google, folks like Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are easily 10x more productive than "the baseline proficient engineer". Any proficient engineer wh…

For those who work inside Google, it's well worth it to look at Jeff & Sanjay's commit history and code review dashboard. They aren't actually all that much more productive in terms of code written than a decent SWE3 who knows his codebase. The reason they have a reputation as rockstars is that they can apply this productivity to things that really matter; they're able to pick out the really important parts of the pr…

You've really hit the nail on the head here, and my response to the article was along the same lines:

Solving the right problem in the right way is the key of programmer productivity. Every programmer in existence who has a baseline of critical thinking has written the wrong code before, and then reflected on it and improved it. You can do this at any level of abstraction from the details of bit flipping all the way up to whole systems architectures. The very best programmers are the ones who are able to think about the gestalt most effectively. This is a tremendously difficult task give our limited conscious brain capacity, and I constantly feel myself bumping up against the edges of it when I work on a big project.

One example of a programmer I really look up to is Yehuda Katz because of his work on Bundler. Rubygems had an awful lot of pain points for large projects, and worse, it had a culture of borderline denial about the existence of these pain points. Yehuda and Carl Lerche worked relentlessly to come up with a solution that addressed 99% of all the recurring projects across a wide variety of scenarios. Then they powered through over a year or more to hammer it into a reliable solution built independently and only loosely coupled with Rubygems. Sure it took months and months and untold hours of hard work, but in the end they effected in a sea change in Ruby dependency management which would have been impossible without the ability to see all sides of a very multi-faceted problem. To me that goes beyond 10x because you could have 1000 good engineers and still not be able to design Bundler.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#114

Post by heelhook » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 8:35 AM UTC

geon wrote: post #105

benaston wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fizzbuzz syndrome is real alright. But someone failing fizzbuzz is not an indicator that they will always be incapable of development. It just means they are very junior and require training. Frighteningly for the West, Indian and Chinese companies appear to grok this and actually develop their employees. US and UK companies throw their hands up in empty self-satisfaction that their work is so intellectually diff…

How senior would you need to be to write fizz-buzz? Will someone ever gork that if they didn't after Teach Yourself Xlang in 24 Hours?

I doubt is a matter of seniority, its a matter of criteria, the way I see it is, FizzBuzz is useful only to weed out perhaps the lower 5% of the developers population and perhaps the lower 20% of the general literate population?

As an anecdote, I asked my wife, who's not a developer, she is an executive at a large beverage company, to solve FizzBuzz and to explain to me how she would do it and she did it successfully. She didn't use the word "for" or "while", but she explained that she figured there must be something that allows you to iterate over the same algorithm several times (paraphrasing).

Personally, I think FizzBuzz are useless unless you use them as part of a submission form before candidates send in their resumes, sort of like a slightly harder captcha. There is no place for a FizzBuzz once the company is already engaging with the company, if they are not able to solve it they will be earlier signs that they lack common sense and criteria.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#115

Post by rejschaap » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 9:13 AM UTC

This is interesting, but I feel the author did not get to the meat of the issue yet. He suggest to relabel the 10x to 1x and 1x to 1/10x. Which to me just leads to a discussion about whether the glass is half empty or half full.

I think the interesting question is, why is it that 1x is generally regarded as default while 10xers are regarded as special.

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#116

Post by jaimebuelta » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 9:26 AM UTC

RockyMcNuts wrote: post #26

If you ask me to design a programming language, I'm a 0 and van Rossum and Kernighan and Ritchie are some finite number, so they are infinity-x me. There are levels where people hit a wall. Some hit it at hello.c, some hit it at writing professional business logic with proper data structures, some hit it at assembly language or programming language design or operating systems. Anyone in over their head at any level i…

Give you some credit. If you had to design a programming language, you'll end with something. You'll have to learn a lot of stuff in the way. Maybe the result won't be awesome, but it will be something, not just 0 ;-)

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#117

Post by Jabbles » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 9:47 AM UTC

rachelbythebay wrote: post #51

NateDad wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife worked with a guy who closed a ticket about closing tickets. If you're measured purely on the basis of number of tickets closed, you can game the system. Replaced users mouse, ticket closed. Or, upgraded network software on 300 machines, ticket closed. If someone is doing twice as many tickets as the next guy, I'd assume he is doing a lot of BS work, not that he's twice as fast.

Well, yeah, that's why I said tickets aren't fungible. Still, when you have someone hopping on them as quickly as they're opened while someone else just grabs one every hour or two, something is wrong. What if I told you the "one every hour or two" person was doing the dumbest, simplest ones, while the top tech was doing the hardest ones (in addition to everything else)? It happened.

What was the distribution of remuneration?

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#118

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 9:55 AM UTC

reeses wrote: post #95

sliverstorm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical that any engineer can independently be responsible for four nines. HA is a big-picture deal. One engineer can break it, but one engineer can't make it. Put differently, a good HA organization does not need 1000x engineers- a good system ensures even garden variety engineers will deliver. There are lenses through which you can look and say "Engineer A was 1000x as productive as Engineer B", but those len…

"When you say someone is 1000x as productive, that means that they sit down and do 3 years of work in 8 hours. (Unless the average developer contributes negative net productivity)" Productivity is value to the organization. If it is an ecommerce entity, Mr. one nine cost the company 1000x in sales vs. Ms. four nines. Your skepticism is noted. As I've said, sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up. Would…

[deleted]

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#119

Post by okamiueru » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 10:08 AM UTC

    [ ] What separates the 10x devs from the 1x? (what _is_ it? Environment, skill, ...)
    [X] 10x productivity myths (why you shouldn't believe it)
    [ ] 10x productivity truths (but, but, it IS true, see?)
    [ ] Be the 10x developer (aspiring to be one)
    [ ] Startup perspective (should startups try to acquire 10x devs?)
    [ ] Why the 10x notion pisses me off (why it shouldn't matter)
    [ ] If 10x productivity why not 10x salary? (or similar)
    [X] Some meta discussion on the metrics of "productivity" (solve for x)
    [ ] Technologies/Languages/Tools/Methodologies that facilitate/impede 10x?
    [ ] 10x in other professions?

Re: There are no 10x developers, but there are 1/10 ones

#120

Post by _wmlk » Fri, Apr 05, 2013, 10:20 AM UTC

kamaal wrote: post #42

nhashem wrote: post #22

"x10 developers" are, in fact, proficient developers, who are experienced with their stack and problem domain. Well, I'd say this is only true for your typical corporate entity, where their products are basically just web applications that represent a state machine using some sort of database store for persistence (which is... basically everything). By the time the company has achieved some size, there's enough proce…

Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures. >>I could have easily been 10x more productive if I didn't have to endure four hour sprint planning meetings I completely understand this feeling. The problem is so plain and simple. There are teams that win because of heroics, they achieve something big. Those management types who lack the chops to be heroes simply try to turn hero…

>>Agile is the current day water fall model. I mean in spirit on in factual procedures. >>My latest irritation is manager types getting too obsessed with Unit testing, it reminds of XML and the way it was abused.

Whenever I read opinions like this all I hear is "Wah wah wah. I'm old and I don't like learning new things. What's wrong with the way I've always worked? Wah wah wah, managers."