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The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
21–30 of 111 posts
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#22I'm failing to follow the logic here. The initial point is that "The potential impact of the lone software engineer is soaring". However, the author then takes that to mean that engineers will be less valuable in the future? This analogy seems apt to me, and I think it makes the logical leap more obvious: Fifty years ago, if you wanted to design a new model of car, you had to get plywood and clay, and work hundreds o…
Replace "software engineer" with "person building a product" in that first quote.
The value of engineering skills as they are defined today is falling, but the value of a single person with an idea and the drive to implement it is soaring.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#23> The same software foundation (open source software, development tools like Github, infrastructure as a service provided by the likes of Digital Ocean, and more) that allowed Whatsapp and Imgur to scale, means that experience and skill writing software become less important.
The author focuses a lot on ease of scaling, but the bigger challenge has always been building applications (experiences) that need scale. If you build it, they will not come.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#24Let's compare writing software to writing English. (Writing is kinda an individual sport) Almost everyone can write a short story in English, but the 10x writers really really stand out. Writing isn't a perfect analogy - we generally think of programming as a skill (right and wrong, boolean, either you can or can't) and writing as an art (shades of gray, non-boolean skill).
The assumption is that more people being able to make things with code would make the 10x engineer less valuable - but I think it makes them more valuable. In a noisy world - only the truly great can stand out. And to really make our future great, we are going to need a lot more than CRUD web apps.
I could be wrong - but I don't think this is as cut and dry as the author claims.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#25Teams are not getting smaller. The original Macintosh team was not much larger than the teams he mentions and probably had much more technological impact.
The web has been around for a quarter century now and still rather trivial websites that mostly could be replaced by tools sell for some $50k. Because even those basic tools we had 25 years to build are not there yet.
Software engineering is actually becoming proper engineering, at least in Europe where much of it is focused more on industry. Crashes are mostly unacceptable now. Embedded software is sometimes formally proved.
Finally, as everyone who actually develops software knows, we need to cut many needed features to ship in time. Think how incredibly long it still takes to implement what you can imagine: It takes many months. This is a good indication of how far we are actually from combining things in a lego-like fashion, from making dreams come true quickly because it is so easy.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#26The arguments are flawed and taken very lightly.
One could argue the exact opposite: Engineers are needed now more than ever. A skilled engineer (what does this even mean in a context so wide?!) can run a website like PinBoard, serving millions of users, from the a jungle in Thailand, on a crappy 56k using a 250 USD ChromeBook.
Of course it's possible but how many people do actually manage to do it successfully?
And while having AWS, Github and you-name-it makes this possible (scaling was the big issue apparently), AWS and Github can not be run by a lonely engineer, you need an army of them.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#27This article is wildly off base, particularly when you look at the examples the article cites.
WhatsApp was able to scale to so many users while keeping the engineering team small precisely because they hired great engineers who wrote an extremely efficient system in Erlang. (Does he think commodity coders know Erlang? Really!?) They heavily tuned their architecture and built efficient paradigms which kept developer productivity & performance from degrading as their user base grew. [1] Commodity engineers don't write that sort of code.
Yes, we increasingly have tools which allow mediocre coders to get stuff done. (For example, Ruby on Rails.) But the inevitable byproduct of letting mediocre coders loose on a stack they only partially understand is a mess of spaghetti code which takes even more developers to maintain. This is already what you see with non-tech corporations who employ dozens/hundreds of developers to maintain Drupal/RoR/Java apps which are significantly simpler in scale & complexity than WhatsApp or Instagram. If you want to use tools well, you need to hire people who understand the tools.
Yes, the tooling has improved dramatically. A 10x engineer of yesteryear might actually be a 100x engineer today. But if you give a bad engineer modern tools, it just allows them to fail faster.
I might be able to build a house with legos, but I expect to be spending a lot more time repairing it than if I'd just hired a carpenter in the first place.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#28I'm failing to follow the logic here. The initial point is that "The potential impact of the lone software engineer is soaring". However, the author then takes that to mean that engineers will be less valuable in the future? This analogy seems apt to me, and I think it makes the logical leap more obvious: Fifty years ago, if you wanted to design a new model of car, you had to get plywood and clay, and work hundreds o…
Replace "software engineer" with "person building a product" in that first quote. The value of engineering skills as they are defined today is falling, but the value of a single person with an idea and the drive to implement it is soaring.
I think the change is purely additive.
Great engineering is no less valuable than it once was, but pure "idea guys" can do stuff now that they couldn't do before.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#29The article suggests that, as super-human programmers build ever-better platforms/languages/tools, those building apps/whatever on top of those will be less differentiated in terms of programming ability, because it will be so easy to develop stuff anyway. I'm not sure this is true. Are 10x programmers really 10x because they can grapple with technology stacks, or because they're really smart and experienced at probl…
I agree.
Specific skills (e.g. working with a certain framework) will go in and out of style, but problem solving will always be in demand.
Also, maybe I'm naive, but I just don't see the software-as-legos future as feasible. There will always be the need for customization and ever-more-advanced functionality.
Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer
#30Its funny I've always thought that Twitter could really be run by 100 folks (heck I've said 40) and be hugely profitable and it a lot of ways more efficient. Instead they've got 2300 employees to allow folks stream 140 character tweets.
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