111–120 of 168 posts
The way to deal with overoptimistic programmers is to put them on maintenance programming, fixing bugs in the code of others, for a few months or years.
He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…
"Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example." It takes 6-8 years of intense training to become a doctor. This is after already doing well in college and passing a tough skills/general intelligence test. The bottom 70%+ who want to become doctors are simp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
N0tch's Twitch streams are rather misleading. It seems like he has incredible speed and productivity but that's mainly because he's repeating a well-rehearsed implementation.
> but that's mainly because he's repeating a well-rehearsed implementation. I would like to watch videos of someone doing something similar, but not well-rehearsed reimplementation. Got any? Thank you..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. also, notch didn't build minecraft expecting it to be a runaway success. see, you are a programmer - you make code. notch is a game developer. he USES code to make THINGS. the things matter, not the code. the game developer ethic is "nothing matters but getting the game running." it's not that notch is…
I think we all use code to make things. However, not caring about the code can spell disaster for the thing we're making. In the case of Minecraft it appears the code is good enough but I wonder how many more features would exist if it wasn't for the poor design.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example." It takes 6-8 years of intense training to become a doctor. This is after already doing well in college and passing a tough skills/general intelligence test. The bottom 70%+ who want to become doctors are simp…
Last time I checked you need much more engineers than doctors.
He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…
I wouldn't be surprised to hear there's a 10x difference in, say, error rates between the best and worst doctors. In fact, I'm almost definitely sure that's a lower bound, given my experiences with doctors in third world countries. Barbaric, some of them still are. Depending how bad the worse doctors are, 10x from "average" might be reasonable. In software development, I think that 10x number is also a lower bound if…
Objective Performance in doctors is harder to judge than in developers. Some specialities lose a high percentage of patients no matter how good the doctors are. Sometimes even a difference of "10x" in error rates may require more cases to judge than a particular doctor actually has in a year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
game devs like notch have made a conscious and canny decision to value actually making something over code quality. also, notch didn't build minecraft expecting it to be a runaway success. see, you are a programmer - you make code. notch is a game developer. he USES code to make THINGS. the things matter, not the code. the game developer ethic is "nothing matters but getting the game running." it's not that notch is…
I think we all use code to make things. However, not caring about the code can spell disaster for the thing we're making. In the case of Minecraft it appears the code is good enough but I wonder how many more features would exist if it wasn't for the poor design.
He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…
A) The person posting simply hasn't had the pleasure of working with such awesomeness.
B) The person is threatened by the possibility of 10X'ers really existing, since that's a threat to their own ego.
I'm a great programmer, and still know many people who leave me in the dust. I'm glad for that.
"The vanity of others offends our taste only when it offends our vanity" -- Nietzsche
He bashes the "myth of the 10x" engineer. Clearly the idea of the 10xer has too big a place in the mythology of our industry. It's oddly masochistic and as far as I know it's unique to us. There are no doctors blogging about "10x doctors" for example. Anybody who has watched N0tch code on Twitch knows that there are certainly people who are far more productive coders than the average engineer. I have no idea if he's…
As far as N0tch, I think that's a bad person to compare yourself against. While I can respect what he achieved and envy his good luck, he is hardly what many would call a good programmer. My standards may be different than others. He may code fast compared to some people (and slower than others), but code speed/output != productivity. Judging by the state of Minecraft and bug counts of what he's done, one could do the same by shifting emphasis or priorities on getting something usable vs. bug free. It is more correct as you imply that other things are just as valuable or perhaps more. It all depends on context. N0tch might be a great prototype programmer, but a terrible programmer for writing banking software and sending things into space. We still don't have many good ways to judge people, which is why dumb managers look at things like lines of code or total hours.
Indeed we know that many factors influence productivity - familiarity with the task and technologies involved, language choice, library choice, deadlines, environment, external influences, and so on. This sick culture of work will make you free is not a good one. I do believe though that many good developers who can work together in a group (very important) are better than having 100x as many people who are bad coders. It really depends how big or small a team is, how it is managed or not, and so on. Having a team of only the best coders isn't enough and can actually seal the doom of a project.