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

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

#121

Post by stusmith1977 »

kamaal wrote: post #81
nostrademons wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I learn from this is, they key to being a 10x developer is to work on problems that have 10x impact and not necessarily writing 10x more code.

And in fact, writing scads of dumb code is often the sign of a poor developer. It often follows from the "never turn back" mentality, that leads them to follow an initial poor choice of solution through to the bitter end.

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

#122

Post by shawabawa3 »

orangethirty wrote: post #35

I'm not a 10x programmer. Probably will never be. I do know of programmers who not only are slower in shipping, but are very bad at designing coherent programs and data structures. That's my main observation. It's not that I'm X times better, its that they are X times slower and make poor design choices. Why? My experience has shown that this tends to happen with people who stop keeping up to date and stop learning.…

>Yet, I don't want to call myself better, because most people here are better than me. Yet this leaves me with quite a strange view of everything. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm not as bad as those guys who worked at some big name place. Where does that leave me? Who knows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

If you think you're bad, you're probably way above average :p

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

#123

Post by mattmanser »

boyter wrote: post #43
orangethirty wrote: post #35

I'm not a 10x programmer. Probably will never be. I do know of programmers who not only are slower in shipping, but are very bad at designing coherent programs and data structures. That's my main observation. It's not that I'm X times better, its that they are X times slower and make poor design choices. Why? My experience has shown that this tends to happen with people who stop keeping up to date and stop learning.…

I feel I am in the same boat as you. I belive myself to be a very average (possibly less so) developer. Even believing that I cannot understand the amount of crap I have been forced to rewrite because it simply does not work. Just recently a expensive contractor was brought in to write a series of simple CRUD screens using .NET MVC and KendoUI. It appeared to work, but if you even scratched the surface you quickly di…

I don't mean this offensively, but this has a bit of a whiff of NIH syndrome.

Rewriting and refactoring existing code is a lot easier and quicker than writing it the first time, even if it's someone else's. Unless you saw a massive drop in TLOC you were probably just rewriting it into your own style. Looking back on my own past, I am guilty of doing this myself more than once.

And raw SQL vs the Entity Framework is not a reason to judge code. There's a lot of warts on that thing still, though I do use it in moderation. LINQ and the EF are two completely different concepts btw which you seem to have muddled. You can use LINQ or the LINQ extension methods with any IEnumerable, not just with the EF ORM.

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

#124

Post by martinced »

davidwoof1 wrote: post #59
zeteo wrote: post #49

These discussions are worse than useless. People with made-up numbers confront people with unreliable anecdotes. Productivity means, very simply, an average of X widgets per hour. Does such a measure even exist for developers? The discussion can apply to such varied situations as: - how fast can a developer add new features to a system they built themselves - how fast can they add features to a system designed by som…

> So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other. I completely disagree. The FizzBuzz syndrome is very real: when I do developer screenings, the majority of candidates simply can't program even tiny problems. There's no way they're faster than anybody on my team at a…

"The FizzBuzz syndrome is very real..."

Yes it is. I think part of the problem is that during the interview and interviewers themselves can answer questions like: "How would you inject here xxx using Spring" (or whatever) and the developer can say something like "I'd use the @Value annotation" and that's basically all the interviewer also happens to know, in his very particular OO+XML+Hibernate+SQL hell.

Yet none of them have basic computer science skills.

Part of the problem is all these people who think that plumbing frameworks and APIs is "programming" while it's just code monkey'ing.

At one point we should get back to the real basics: I know my computer science stuff and I could actually write frameworks and APIs.

We should focus more on interviews that tests basic CS programming knowledge and understanding how you create a framework, not how you use one... Because obviously people knowing enough as to how to create a framework know how to use one.

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

#126

Post by edoloughlin »

_wmlk wrote: post #120
kamaal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

The problem with unit tests and a certain type of manager is that they see the unit test coverage as something that must be managed to be as close as possible to 100%, when this is arguably a waste of effort.

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

#127

Post by colomon »

shubhamjain wrote: post #88

Isn't it obvious that people who use dual monitors, take time to set up projects, one step builds, thonl before coding, think about their work be more productive then who don't. What I feel is productivoty isn't magical which a programmer has, it is driven by how much obsessed the programmer is in increasing it ( too much obsession wont be great though ).

What you're describing (not counting dual monitors, which is a complete non-sequitur IMO) is just basic competence. When people are talking about 10x, it is more a matter of knowing what to do and how to do it.

As a simple example, consider implementing a shuffle from scratch. The inexperienced programmer will muddle about with loops and random statements, a few false starts, and probably after a morning or so will end up with something that is slower than necessary and perhaps not quite as random as it should be.

The experienced programmer will say "Fisher–Yates shuffle!" and have a top-in-class implementation ten minutes later.

The 10x programmers I've known were experienced like that in seemingly everything. I'm pretty sure I'm an above average programmer, yet I could routinely save myself hours of work by consulting with them for five minutes...

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

#128

Post by dgabriel »

_wmlk wrote: post #120
kamaal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Agile has been around for many, many years. I think the Agile Manifesto is a teenager by now. There are a lot of people well into their careers who have "always worked" the so-called Agile way.

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

#129

Post by durzagott »

dgabriel wrote: post #128
_wmlk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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."

Agile has been around for many, many years. I think the Agile Manifesto is a teenager by now. There are a lot of people well into their careers who have "always worked" the so-called Agile way.

Sure, but I don't see why an effort to study how successful teams work and distil in a methodology needs to be derided by other programmers.

Most managers I've worked with just wanted some transparency and predictability to the process. Waterfall failed to provide that and now the industry is experimenting with Agile.

I find it distasteful when developers grumble to each other about having to perform basic tasks such as unit testing (TDD, BDD or whatever). I've worked with far too many 1/10x developers to know some kind of process is required to keep them on the straight and narrow.

There is no magic bullet, but I think it's time we stop snorting in derision at the industry's attempts to reduce the unpredictability of building (and maintaining!) complex software.

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

#130

Post by ctdonath »

benaston wrote: post #71
davidwoof1 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I would venture that, for any pair of moderately experienced developers, it's almost always possible to find a pair of tasks such that one of them is twice (or even ten times) as fast as the other. I completely disagree. The FizzBuzz syndrome is very real: when I do developer screenings, the majority of candidates simply can't program even tiny problems. There's no way they're faster than anybody on my team at a…

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…

By the time you're evaluating someone with FizzBuzz, they're trying to convince you they have training and have developed from "very junior" (to wit untrained). FizzBuzz is the kind of test which should be a pass/fail final exam question for a 6-week Beginning Programming course, not something any degreed entry-level candidate would have trouble with.

Can they be trained? sure. But when applying for jobs, they're expected to already have training up to basic competency for the position. A restaurant shouldn't have to teach a prospective cook how to make a grilled cheese sandwich, an auto repair shop shouldn't have to teach a prospective mechanic how to change a tire, and a software house shouldn't have to teach a prospective programmer how to write FizzBuzz.

If such training is in fact needed, then the higher education "industry" is broken to the point that businesses should just get kids straight out of high school and take 'em from there.

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