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Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

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Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#11

Post by bearjaws »

I hate the notion of "10x developer".

It focuses on hiring the best person, rather than firing individuals who undermine the team. The reality is, there are some 1x developers, and some .5x developers. Even worse though are the -1x developers. So many times I see a corporate culture of firing = bad, so lets just try to find someone who is a "10x", when really all you need is to remove the people who cause more work for the organization.

Its our job as managers to accept that we hired someone who is ineffective, damaging the team and that OUR hiring process failed to catch that. Then to deal with them (training, firing) and iterate on the hiring process to prevent the issue going forward.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#13

Post by ses1984 »

bearjaws wrote: post #11

I hate the notion of "10x developer". It focuses on hiring the best person, rather than firing individuals who undermine the team. The reality is, there are some 1x developers, and some .5x developers. Even worse though are the -1x developers. So many times I see a corporate culture of firing = bad, so lets just try to find someone who is a "10x", when really all you need is to remove the people who cause more work f…

I knew two 10x developers at my previous job. One of them was humble and a great mentor and elevated everyone around him. One was a grump who made everyone around him feel stupid.

Imo toxicity is independent from productivity.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#14

Post by dave_aiello »

Think of this essay as a barbell, in the investment sense of the word. The beginning and the end of it have some really good insights that can be generalized to a lot of technical / development work.

The middle of the essay (Rules 4-16) are useful observations from Mickey's experience. (I don't know him; I am just trying to relate this paragraph of comments to his experience more explicitly.) This is not a bad thing.

If you are a 1x developer yourself who is looking to improve, I think you want to read treatises like this and try to understand your fellow developer's perspective.

Only truly brilliant developers can give generalized language and database platform advice. The other people who give valuable advice at this level are not developers, they are technology evangelists who have a track record of success helping real developers.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#15

Post by joelbluminator »

bearjaws wrote: post #11

I hate the notion of "10x developer". It focuses on hiring the best person, rather than firing individuals who undermine the team. The reality is, there are some 1x developers, and some .5x developers. Even worse though are the -1x developers. So many times I see a corporate culture of firing = bad, so lets just try to find someone who is a "10x", when really all you need is to remove the people who cause more work f…

Most companies don't need a "10x developer", especially if you're building yet another CRUD web app. You need good, hard working people who love the profession and are good working in a team. That's it. It doesn't take Einstein to do this job. Maybe if you're Shopify it makes sense to hire a few of the greatest Rails developers out there (which they did), but otherwise? This isn't rocket science.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#16

Post by mozey »

twic wrote: post #7
stefanchrobot wrote: post #4

Quite surprising take on the languages. > When to use Python or Ruby > Python and Ruby seem to me to be pretty similar in that they’re scripting languages and dynamically typed and seemed like the greatest thing in the 00’s. You use them when speed is more important than legibility or debugging. I'd say you pick them when productivity and time to market is important. I personally find dynamic languages far more legib…

> I personally find dynamic languages far more legible Maybe you're a 2xer though.

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" -Brian Kernighan

Over time I've come to appreciate this sentiment. Banging out clever code super fast isn't that important... Spending some time up front thinking about types and architecture pays off in the long run. Especially for server side code. Far from being annoying, error messages from the compiler make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

On the other hand, for quickly prototyping user interfaces, some "stream of consciousness" Javascript might just be good enough.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#17

Post by vsareto »

>One great example of this is the debacle of the Amazon internal wiki migration. Back in 2015, the Amazon InfoSec team banned PHP at the company.

Oof. To be fair, Java is probably way easier to code review.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#18

Post by MaxBarraclough »

laumars wrote: post #10
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #8

This is poorly titled. A '1x developer' is by definition an average developer. The page is mostly listing basic knowledge that any developer, even a very junior one, should already have. If you aren't aware of the relative strengths and weaknesses of Java, C, and Python, you aren't a 1x developer, you're a trainee. Anyone know of any better articles truly targeted at '1x' developers? (This isn't snark, it's an invita…

The 1x / 10x memes need to die in my opinion.

Agreed. 1x should be a synonym for ordinary, but as we're seeing here, its meaning had drifted to refer to especially unskilled developers.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#19

Post by faizshah »

stefanchrobot wrote: post #4

Quite surprising take on the languages. > When to use Python or Ruby > Python and Ruby seem to me to be pretty similar in that they’re scripting languages and dynamically typed and seemed like the greatest thing in the 00’s. You use them when speed is more important than legibility or debugging. I'd say you pick them when productivity and time to market is important. I personally find dynamic languages far more legib…

People overrate the elegance and readability of languages. You can write elegant and inelegant Java. I've seen python code that is totally unmaintainable and python code that's some of the most elegant out there. You can find Rails code that is some of the most indecipherable spaghetti out there despite Ruby being such an elegant language (the project had Fat Controllers, Fat Views and Fat Stored Procedures...yikes). There's a lot of elegant C code out there then there's C code where you don't wanna touch anything because you're not sure what anything does.

I think the general rule of thumb for languages is pick whichever language has the best community, learning resources and packages for your project.

For example R excels at analyzing data because of the wealth of packages from industry and academia for analyzing data and the tutorials dedicated to statistical analysis in R. Python excels at high performance data driven products because of the wealth of packages for ML, scientific computing, etc and the wealth of resources on doing these things in python.

The exception to this is JS and your point about Phoenix LiveView. Potentially it could be better to pick a single language for frontend and backend to limit context switching while developing frontend and backend.

I haven't used Clojure or Haskell yet so I don't know what they excel at. I also haven't dived into Erlang and Go enough to know which situations either is better for scalable backends.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#20

Post by justaguyhere »

ses1984 wrote: post #13
bearjaws wrote: post #11

I hate the notion of "10x developer". It focuses on hiring the best person, rather than firing individuals who undermine the team. The reality is, there are some 1x developers, and some .5x developers. Even worse though are the -1x developers. So many times I see a corporate culture of firing = bad, so lets just try to find someone who is a "10x", when really all you need is to remove the people who cause more work f…

I knew two 10x developers at my previous job. One of them was humble and a great mentor and elevated everyone around him. One was a grump who made everyone around him feel stupid. Imo toxicity is independent from productivity.

Same experience. I learned quite a bit simply by sitting next to an exceptionally good and exceptionally nice developer who was at least a decade older than the rest of the team and enjoyed helping others. He rarely got stressed even in crunch times and that put rest of the team at ease.
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