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The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

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Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#91

Post by eldavido »

menzoic wrote: post #75
eldavido wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. If you spend a few years at university (I have two degrees), you learn things like sorts, automata, proofs, and calculus. On the other hand, most of the junk I deal with day-to-day as a working software developer turns more on my knowledge of tools like Chef/IntelliJ, software libraries (the stdlib of various languages, the Java/.NET BCLs), build systems, git/github, and how to do a proper code review.…

You compare two people who have different skills. Presumably either one could learn the skills of the other. Why choose the one with the easiest skills to learn?

Because learning skills takes time, and in tech, time is everything.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#92

Post by GFischer »

eldavido wrote: post #28
akavi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they do stuff, by definition then they aren't "idea guys" :)

You might mean "nontechnical people can do a functioning MVP" which they couldn't before :)

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#93

Post by GFischer »

EGreg wrote: post #86
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?

Why not try Show HN? Maybe someone thought you were "hijacking" the thread.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#94

Post by EGreg »

GFischer wrote: post #93
EGreg wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why not try Show HN? Maybe someone thought you were "hijacking" the thread.

Maybe. I mean, this is very related. I'm not ready yet for a Show HN. Must finish the platform docs first.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#96

Post by coldtea »

segmondy wrote: post #89
coldtea wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

What you said actually corroborates what I wrote.

>How many people where creating their own languages 20 years ago?

20 years ago? Far less. That means writing a language is getting more commoditized -- and we work in a higher, easier, level of abstraction. That's what TFA says about other spheres of development and deployment too.

>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.

Neither I, nor the article, said there are fewer great engineers. Only that fewer great engineers are (and fewer still will be) needed. Both as a percentage of all great engineers, and in absolute numbers.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#97

Post by coldtea »

morgante wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, I don't find it valid to be frank. They might be valued, but they are valued less and less, and will be valued even less in the future.

An enterprise that used to need 100 engineers, with the cloud, SaaS, PaaS etc, can even today make do with 1/5 of that. Is there any trend showing companies needing MORE software engineers?

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#98

Post by coldtea »

harpastum wrote: post #70
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 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 pr…

Well, they might technically have an engineer, but it could be some average joe, using a "21st century" equivalent of Hypercard -- building a whole startup with some composable cloud components and some logic.

After all, the basic skills for a successful startup, even today, are not hardcore engineering skills, but idea, business, finances, etc.

I mean, most startups bought for multi billion dollars work on BS trivial engineering problems (mostly: make a social web service scalable), compared to what talented engineers do elsewhere (in research, in space exploration, in robotics, in DSP, etc).

Heck, wasn't Facebook started with crappy PHP code a 15 year old could write (and a 20 year old did wrote)? Or, for a smaller scale example, Derek Shivers (which I admire) sold his CDBaby startup for a nice sum, and that was also started and based on amateurish code at best that he wrote himself.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#99

Post by coldtea »

segmondy wrote: post #87
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…

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

It's a problem if you are an engineer. It's the kind of "going homeless" fuckery.

It's also a problem, longer term, if you are an entrepreneur. Initially it starts as "lower costs", but with an impoverished middle class, you soon find there are not that many people to buy your fancy products and services.

Automation is only good is it's combined with a scheme for the surplus of labor -- e.g less hours work week, creation of new kind of jobs, etc. Without that is a huge creator of poverty and inequality, and eventually the collapse of a market economy.

Re: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer

#100

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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