The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#81

Post by coldtea » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:38 PM UTC

samg wrote: post #53

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.

Alternatively, a creator can now build a product with fewer people and doesn't need to raise capital. This trend is extremely empowering of labor.

Actually it makes labor redundunt.

People talk as if everyone can become a creator, which it ain't so (partly because of the personal skills needed, partly because there's no economy where "everybody is a creator" -- for the same reason why not everybody can be a millionaire at the same time (money loses it's value then). Any large scale economy needs few sellers/creators and many buyers).

So what this trend does, it empower a few programmers/creators (ok, more than the past few large capital owners), and makes all the other programmers redundant or devalued.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#82

Post by mahyarm » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:40 PM UTC

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 also makes design decisions that I would call 'engineer-easy'. Their iOS app is pretty much all default system widgets and behavior for example, which is significantly less code to maintain than something that was customized heavily.

On the server side they don't retain conversations, have multi-session usage (many clients, one user), etc which simplifies what is required.

I haven't used whatsapp in a while so things might of changed, but before they were acquired by Facebook, that was definitely their direction.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#83

Post by arach » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:47 PM UTC

I happen to think that because the leverage is greater, the reward for hiring highly skilled & talented engineers is much greater than it ever was.

All the products mentioned were functionally simple and I like billyhoffman's explanation of why the low functionality/large audience products don't represent the majority of the industry - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8109434

I'm trying to understand how Sam Gerstenzang becomes a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and I can't figure it out.

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/sam-gerstenzang

I don't want to ad hominem, I'm just a bit puzzled. It seems like he was an engineer for about 12 months. Anyone here know him?

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#84

Post by coldtea » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 5:51 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #73

coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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. The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Or that they only need to work at infrastructure companies (not application companies like WhatsApp). The very example h…

>The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all.

Well, not really, because somebody will have to build all those elaborate abstraction layers people will use.

The core idea is that we'll need much fewer great engineers -- which is another way of saying we won't need "great engineers" at all. Read "not need them at all" liberally (very few), not literally (nobody).

After all if job demand goes from 1,000,000 people to 1000 people (arbitrary numbers), it's like it's the end of that job, even if technically people are still employed (there are after all horse cabbies and film lab technicians and letterpress printers employed still today).

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#85

Post by morgante » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:10 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #84

morgante wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Or that they only need to work at infrastructure companies (not application companies like WhatsApp). The very example h…

> The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Well, not really, because somebody will have to build all those elaborate abstraction layers people will use. The core idea is that we'll need much fewer great engineers -- which is another way of saying we won't need "great engineers" at all. Read "not need them at all" liberally (very few), not literally (nobody). After all if j…

> Well, not really, because somebody will have to build all those elaborate abstraction layers people will use.

It's almost as though you completely ignored my next sentence, which clarified that great engineers continue to be valued outside of abstraction/infrastructure companies.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#86

Post by EGreg » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

EGreg wrote: post #12

I had this vision 5 years ago, for sort of an operating system for social apps. Where a regular user could build their own app by just installing some plugins, dropping a chatroom and some other components on a page, paying a developer to wire them up, and paying a designer to design the theme. And there would be a marketplace of components built by more experienced developers. So 5 years ago I started my first open…

How come every time I post about the platform I've spent 3 years building someone here decides to vote it down? I'm just curious. Is it really something you don't want to be spoken about?

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#87

Post by segmondy » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

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…

How is it a problem that we were able to solve a problem with less engineers? What fuckery is this?

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#88

Post by mdda » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:18 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #51

ardit33 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great programmers move up the chain as well. If your skills are not being valued by your company as it is setup in a way that it needs only average engineers, you can move on and create your own company now. If you are a great engineer, then you are a walking capital by yourself. If somebody with an idea, and no skills, hires you, then it probably needs at least 300-500k (even for a smallish prototype) to make it hap…

> If you are a great engineer, you are the capital! It only seems that way because engineering is currently the most capital-heavy part of bringing a softwarebusiness to market. Once that ceases to be the case (which may take a while, but it's the future SG was gushing about) then as long as there is a single scarce or mutually-exclusive commodity necessary for success its price will ratchet upwards until it is out o…

But once the Engineering component has been hammered down as much as server costs were in the previous generation ('Sun pizza boxes with Oracle' turned into AWS on OSS), what's the next largest expense line?

If the next most expensive thing is the marketing spend, so that the company gets the required exposure in overcrowded app stores (for example), then the VCs are painting themselves into a Hollywood hit role - at best.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#89

Post by segmondy » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:20 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #84

morgante wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Or that they only need to work at infrastructure companies (not application companies like WhatsApp). The very example h…

> The premise of the article seems to be that we no longer need great engineers at all. Well, not really, because somebody will have to build all those elaborate abstraction layers people will use. The core idea is that we'll need much fewer great engineers -- which is another way of saying we won't need "great engineers" at all. Read "not need them at all" liberally (very few), not literally (nobody). After all if j…

This is absurd. How many people where creating their own languages 20 years ago? Everyone and their grand ma is building new languages on top of javascript. The expertise level of software engineers is going up! 20 years ago, how many people could build a VM from the ground up? Have you visited github lately? Sure, an average engineer can do much more today, and the reason is because of these great engineers, and they are not fewer by any means.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#90

Post by segmondy » Wed, Jul 30, 2014, 6:22 PM UTC

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.

What's wrong with a future where some software devs can be tossed aside? We have been excited to disrupt all other areas of labor. Disruption is good, it means progress, right?