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The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

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Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#61

Post by harpastum »

nickpinkston wrote: post #44

I love how all the top comments here are all devs in denial about this, but it's an inevitability that programming "becomes legos". Don't become the old men guys! As said in the article and below, many products will still require very high-level engineers building without "legos", but the basic webapp kind of stuff probably will be full commodity able to be built by anyone with the motivation to see it through.

It's not about being in denial. It's that this argument has been brought up with every advance in the last 40 years.

In the early '70s it was "Programming in C will allow anyone to program and commoditize the industry!".

In the later '70s it was "Object-oriented programming allows modules to be created that snap together like legos, commoditizing the industry!".

In the '80s-90s it was "Scripting languages like ruby and python are so simple, it's almost like writing real english! It's so simple you won't even need a programmer."

In the early '00s it was "Scratch and other visual programming languages will create a platform that everyone can understand! You can learn it yourself, you don't need a developer."

Now, it's "Libraries and tooling are getting so great, what used to take 100 engineers now takes 5. In a few years, it will take zero!"

--

That obviously isn't proof that this time is the same as the others. However, this article gives no evidence that I can see why this simplification and removal of inefficiencies is any different than the others.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#63

Post by tferraz »

birken wrote: post #47

This post is making the completely wrong conclusion. The reason companies like Instagram, Imgur, etc are able to service large #s of users with 7 engineers is mainly because computers and tools are a lot CHEAPER than they used to be, not simpler. Cheaper. Less expensive. This allows small teams to build really huge things because generally small teams don't have much money (because if they did, they'd have a bigger t…

I think the tools are not simpler as being simplist, but easier to use, maybe by having clearer objectives and design than it's predecessor. Also, it was not long ago that put a web system was hardm with lot's of workaround or using not specialized tools for the job. Today is clearer what one need to create and support such system online.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#64

Post by nickpinkston »

harpastum wrote: post #61
nickpinkston wrote: post #44

I love how all the top comments here are all devs in denial about this, but it's an inevitability that programming "becomes legos". Don't become the old men guys! As said in the article and below, many products will still require very high-level engineers building without "legos", but the basic webapp kind of stuff probably will be full commodity able to be built by anyone with the motivation to see it through.

It's not about being in denial. It's that this argument has been brought up with every advance in the last 40 years. In the early '70s it was "Programming in C will allow anyone to program and commoditize the industry!". In the later '70s it was "Object-oriented programming allows modules to be created that snap together like legos, commoditizing the industry!". In the '80s-90s it was "Scripting languages like ruby a…

Yea...and it has gotten easier. I'd bet the average level of software dev (writ large) today is lower than 20 years ago because it's getting easier. (Though I'd bet there's probably more great devs today ever because the pool of devs itself is growing and becoming more accessible)

Sure, having MS Word doesn't make you a novelist, but Wordpress + plug-ins can let you make your own pretty high-quality news site with very little technical knowledge - that's real improvement.

I'd say to just give it time.

My company is doing this to another set of engineers in the mechanical / manufacturing space, so I hear these types of complaints all the time.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#65

Post by coldtea »

morgante wrote: post #27

This 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…

>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. They heavily tuned their architecture and build efficient paradigms which kept developer productivity & performance from degrading as their user base grew. [1] Commodity engineers don't write that sort of code.

The problem is they did it with only a few (16?) "great engineers". That's the premise of the article -- our world today might need 100,000 great engineers to solve great problems. Tomorrow 1000 might be enough.

As for the "near great" they would too be less needed, and commodity engineers would be the equivalent of burger flipers.

>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 allow.

The first yes, the second not really. A bad engineer can get enormously more done with modern tools than he could 10 or 30 years ago. Essentially a bad engineer today can build stuff that took high level senior engineers to build -- and do it in less time too. It might be a little crude, but it will work.

E.g a bad engineer can automate a workflow that would have taken expert engineers, custom software and several man-years to do 20 years ago, and can do it in a day.

And because it's so abstracted, building something like that needs little influence from his skills, so his "badness" doesn't show up much.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#66

Post by monochr »

akavi wrote: post #22
harpastum wrote: post #15

I'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.

Back when I was a physicists every two bit crank used to go on about how ideas were more important than knowledge.

Now I'm hearing the same in programming. And it's just as wrong here. Picking the right algorithm and stack means the difference between a website that can handle 2,000 people and one that can handle 2,000,000. How many websites start off with a bad idea, get popular and then need to hire hundreds of engineers to put ban aid after band aid on a fundamentally terrible idea?

Facebook and google have both had to spend millions of man hours to fix the fact they were optimized for millions of users and billions of web pages and now have to deal with x1000 times those. And the only reason why they were that prepared in the first place was because extraordinary people wrote them. The average developer who bangs out a half thought out colour by numbers website would be lucky to have it not crash before it reaches a thousand users a day.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#67

Post by dropit_sphere »

coldtea wrote: post #65
morgante wrote: post #27

This 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…

> 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. They heavily tuned their architecture and build efficient paradigms which kept developer productivity & performance from degrading as their user base grew. [1] Commodity engineers don't write that sort of code. The problem is they did it…

There are always greater problems. Still don't have my flying car.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#68

Post by jjoonathan »

rjknight wrote: post #60
jjoonathan wrote: post #13

> As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people. It's one thing to know that capital secretly delights over the commoditization of labor. It's quite another to watch a16z gush so openly about a future where we can be tossed aside.

It seems to me that with crowd-funding and big data, the people who have jobs picking winning companies out from a lineup will be obsolete before the engineers building the crowd-funding and big data platforms will be.

> the people who have jobs picking winning companies

Remember, capital has TWO strategies for earning money:

1. Investing in new ideas, hoping they yield a positive ROI

2. Collecting dividends on ideas that have already panned out

#1 might conceivably be replaced by algorithms, but I doubt it (has HFT eaten Wall St?). #2 is inherent in our economic system and will never become obsolete.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#69

Post by menzoic »

jjoonathan wrote: post #35
nsxwolf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems this claim has been made forever. COBOL was supposed to make programmers unnecessary. So were rules engines. And code generators and an endless list of other technologies.

I agree that Gerstenzang is premature. But it'll happen eventually. If it doesn't happen by making programming easy it will happen by flooding the industry with enough competent programmers to have the same effect (depressed wages, high unemployment, etc). See: non-software engineering occupations (excepting doctors, who have managed to turn the risks inherent in their profession into a legally mandated union).

Demand for engineers is increasing much more rapidly than non-software engineering occupations. Soon every company will need an software engineer of some sort.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#70

Post by harpastum »

coldtea wrote: post #65
morgante wrote: post #27

This 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…

> 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. They heavily tuned their architecture and build efficient paradigms which kept developer productivity & performance from degrading as their user base grew. [1] Commodity engineers don't write that sort of code. The problem is they did it…

The problem with the article's conclusion (and title) is that they don't stop with 100,000 -> 1,000 engineers.

"Tomorrow, that billion-dollar startup acquisition might not need an engineer at all."

The article's claim is not that startups are going to keep having smaller and smaller teams of higher-value engineers, they're saying that they're going to have zero engineers. Which I don't see at all from the evidence provided.

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