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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

#131

Post by igouy »

jdlshore wrote: post #110
justin_vanw wrote: post #19

Well, if the author kindof hasn't seen it, I guess I should ignore this stuff: Boehm, Barry W., and Philip N. Papaccio. 1988. "Understanding and Controlling Software Costs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-14, no. 10 (October): 1462-77. Boehm, Barry, 1981. Software Engineering Economics, Boston, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1981. Boehm, Barry, et al, 2000. Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II, Boston, Mass.…

Have you read those references? Or are you just quoting them blindly? Laurent Bossavit has read them, and he reports that they are, for the most part, reporting on each other and on anecdotes. There is no actual, scientific evidence for the "10x programmer." He writes up his search for the evidence in his book "The Leprechauns of Software Development." It's a fascinating look at how a supposedly-rational group of peo…

Have you read those references? Or are you just quoting Laurent Bossavit blindly?

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

#132

Post by T-hawk »

heelhook wrote: post #114
geon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> FizzBuzz is useful only to weed out perhaps the lower 5% of the developers population

Problem is, that 5% represents way more than 5% of the pool of job applicants, since it's those folks that continuously get rejected from jobs and keep applying. Any company hiring developers needs a decent FizzBuzz filter to sort out this riff-raff.

> There is no place for a FizzBuzz once the company is already engaging

In a technical and sharp company, yeah. In a company where the resumes go through HR and nontechnical managers, such that the first point of any technical evaluation is in the interview itself, then yeah that interviewer is going to need a FizzBuzz. And this is distressingly common in companies who hire some software developers but whose primary domain is not technology, like medicine or shipping or education.

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

#133

Post by reeses »

sliverstorm wrote: post #99
reeses wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up At which point I guess we get down to what is an average developer. Does the average developer make such big screw-ups that simply not screwing up is 100x increase in performance? I guess when I think "average", I'm not thinking about what is actually the measured average , but more like "acceptable competency". Never destroys shit, but also never advances the pro…

The average developer, in my mind, is a person right in the middle of the group of people who can maintain a position as a "programmer" or "developer" or any equivalent terms.

You've made a number of assumptions that I was trying to squash.

Most developers do not work on "projects". They're not doing startups or even working for software companies. They're anyone from the guy maintaining a FoxPro database for a dry cleaning chain to a jedi ninja who poops better, tighter, inventive code than the rest of us can dream of.

How do you measure someone's productivity in an environment where they write or patch code based on their manager coming around and asking them to do make tiny changes or write reports? As an analogy, how would you measure the productivity of the "hero" of Office Space? He turns two character dates into four character dates. He's a programmer, but he's not actually "producing" anything. He's keeping the world from ending in 2000! His manager would probably count his productivity as how many lines/files/whatever he updates in a given period of time.

The lines of code metric was an attempt to illustrate that productivity is a difficult task to measure without a goal-oriented context. You see that measuring productivity is not just "lines of code," but you also missed that the developer spent time refactoring 1,000 lines of code. Is that productive? Measured on that day, the work done was zero, or negative, and productivity can only be measured in the medium to long term. Yet I hope we would both agree that it was a productive effort.

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

#134

Post by reeses »

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?

Fizzbuzz is an analytical problem, not really a programming problem. A kid with no knowledge of a particular programming language could create an algorithm for it with a little guidance.

"Are there any patterns in this that we could use to make this shorter?" , "You're printing 'fizz' more than once. Is that necessary?", etc.

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

#135

Post by reeses »

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…

NO!

You're not a 0 at designing a programming language.

If you look at modern C++, you may think that it's impossible to design that language. TBH, I'd be incredibly surprised if the current standard is implemented on all of the major compiler platforms before the next standard is released.

Remember one of the most important rules in programming and problem solving in general.

If you can't see how to solve a problem, break it into n smaller problems. Repeat as needed until you have a problem you can see how to solve and solve that problem.

You don't need to know lex/yacc, ANTLR, LLVM, recursive descent, LALR(1), or any of that crap to design a language that will be useful for you. They'll give you leverage and have incredible value, but I assure you that you have the ability, today, to design and implement a programming language if you can program at all.

It may not be a general purpose language, but look at languages with minimal syntax, such as forth or a very simplified lisp/scheme. Start by recognizing strings, categorize those strings into your language keywords and program values, and make the computer do something based on the combination. Start with a program that can do something like "print hello" and work from there. You can even add comments by looking for a "#" and ignoring everything from there to the end of the line. You're on your way from there.

Do not hold yourself back by thinking any problem that other people can solve is intractable. The main advantage for more experienced developers is that they can think in abstractions and assemble those abstractions into a solution.

Sorry for the emotional intensity. Sorry also for ignoring the rest of your comment, as it's relevant.

But I care more about your mindset than the argument. You're better than a 0 even if it's just because you understand that you do not yet know something.

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

#136

Post by alttab »

255martyn wrote: post #68
alttab wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you saying if you are a man, that talking to a woman makes you a 1/10x developer? Or am I missing something?

Hah, I don't think the parent post is literal. The point being that it's easy to be a 10x developer if you have 10x the focus.

Lets just be lucky the poster wasn't at Pycon

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

#137

Post by papsosouid »

jdlshore wrote: post #110
justin_vanw wrote: post #19

Well, if the author kindof hasn't seen it, I guess I should ignore this stuff: Boehm, Barry W., and Philip N. Papaccio. 1988. "Understanding and Controlling Software Costs." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-14, no. 10 (October): 1462-77. Boehm, Barry, 1981. Software Engineering Economics, Boston, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1981. Boehm, Barry, et al, 2000. Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II, Boston, Mass.…

Have you read those references? Or are you just quoting them blindly? Laurent Bossavit has read them, and he reports that they are, for the most part, reporting on each other and on anecdotes. There is no actual, scientific evidence for the "10x programmer." He writes up his search for the evidence in his book "The Leprechauns of Software Development." It's a fascinating look at how a supposedly-rational group of peo…

What are you talking about? You should read those references. Just download peopleware for fuck's sake, rather than regurgitating bullshit. There is strong evidence that the most productive programmers are 10x as productive as the least productive programmers.

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

#138

Post by papsosouid »

jared314 wrote: post #37

All the articles about "10x" developers, "1/10" developers, or "super" developers have not taught me anything about how to improve my skills, or a team's skills. Even the articles that promote the "10,000 hours" or "Just F'ing Do It" mantra feel like proselytizing without practical, or proven, methodologies.

Articles are not intended to teach you, they are intended to attract attention to their authors. If you want to learn about productivity in software development, read peopleware.

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

#139

Post by sliverstorm »

reeses wrote: post #133
sliverstorm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sometimes productivity is measured as not screwing up At which point I guess we get down to what is an average developer. Does the average developer make such big screw-ups that simply not screwing up is 100x increase in performance? I guess when I think "average", I'm not thinking about what is actually the measured average , but more like "acceptable competency". Never destroys shit, but also never advances the pro…

The average developer, in my mind, is a person right in the middle of the group of people who can maintain a position as a "programmer" or "developer" or any equivalent terms. You've made a number of assumptions that I was trying to squash. Most developers do not work on "projects". They're not doing startups or even working for software companies. They're anyone from the guy maintaining a FoxPro database for a dry c…

In regards to 1,000 LOC vs. 10 LOC, I still maintain that I'd have to see it. Most of the time you'll be right, but that refactoring is not necessarily productive as a rule.

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

#140

Post by rhizome »

krapp wrote: post #30
Maven911 wrote: post #20

I think its important to note that if we didn't have ten fingers and created a decimal numbering system, we probably wouldn't be using the 10x factor

Perhaps, but then our 6x or whatever factor would still mean essentially same thing.

Think of how much better programmers would be if they were being measured in base20, though. "There are no 20x programmers, but there are 1/20 programmers!"
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