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Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

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Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#11

Post by freemarketteddy »

"Thus the organized proletariat after the downfall of the capitalist system was to work for the establishment of state-owned and operated industry, the tremendous expansion of production by freeing it from capitalist restrictions, and the creation of a new psychology in which each would want to perform his social function. All capitalist ideology would be crushed, and all antagonistic differentiation between manual and mental labor (and therefore between town and country and between degrees of skill) would cease."

- An excerpt from "Full Communism - The Ultimate Goal" http://www.economictheories.org/2009/05/full-communism-ultim...

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#12

Post by freemarketteddy »

dexen wrote: post #9

> there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, I beg to differ, using examples of Fabrice Bellard creating QEMU, Brendan Eich creating JavaScript or PG creating Arc and HN. Of course there are other examples out there, one just ought to look. Those are not tasks a single `industry average' developer or a team…

>Perhaps in 10x the timeframe they would producte something of similar capability

I think you missed a few zeros there!.I would argue that most developers would never (yes not even if they spend their entire lives) come up with anything even close to Fabrice Bellard or Paul Graham.

The difference is not genetic but of attitudes and as we all know very people are willing to change their attitudes.

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#13

Post by alexgartrell »

I hope I don't sound rantish, but the author completely missed on his treatment of the Boehm/Beck curves

The Beck curve seems to (I'm not expert) describe the cost of making a change or adding a feature. With routine deployment in XP, it's not going to be that expensive to roll out a new one (although, the Facebook push is a process that requires the complete, undivided attention of lots of smart people, so you don't exactly get it "for free")

The Boehm curve describes the cost of finding a defect. If you find a defect in unit testing, you've wasted one person's time; in inspection, two; in systems testing, possibly many more than two; and in production, potentially 500 million people's time. Not just that, but the bugs are much harder to find.

Consider a hypothetical bug that leaks memory in the event of network flakiness. Your servers are humming along just fine, there's a transient network failure that you fix, and then you think you're fine. Meanwhile you've leaked a ton of memory, web servers start swapping, and the user experience goes to shit as most requests are delayed or timed out. You can fix this by restarting everything (but you should fear the cold roll in general [1]). So now you're fucked; you've got this weird bug that only shows up when the planets align while the microwave is on, no easy repro, and it's costing you real time and money.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/n49rw/were_ba...

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#14

Post by codeonfire »

dexen wrote: post #9

> there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, I beg to differ, using examples of Fabrice Bellard creating QEMU, Brendan Eich creating JavaScript or PG creating Arc and HN. Of course there are other examples out there, one just ought to look. Those are not tasks a single `industry average' developer or a team…

We are discussing productivity in the corporate bureaucracy, not efficacy and fame. And do you have any evidence that the success of those projects were due to those persons rather than the environment in which the projects were developed and supported?

And before you reply, no efficacy is not productivity unless you are going to credit the original microsoft windows developers as productive as well.

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#15

Post by gujk »

dexen wrote: post #9

> there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, I beg to differ, using examples of Fabrice Bellard creating QEMU, Brendan Eich creating JavaScript or PG creating Arc and HN. Of course there are other examples out there, one just ought to look. Those are not tasks a single `industry average' developer or a team…

As a programming achievement, I think you mean ViaWeb, and the Arc or HN.

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#16

Post by gujk »

codeonfire wrote: post #14
dexen wrote: post #9

> there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, I beg to differ, using examples of Fabrice Bellard creating QEMU, Brendan Eich creating JavaScript or PG creating Arc and HN. Of course there are other examples out there, one just ought to look. Those are not tasks a single `industry average' developer or a team…

We are discussing productivity in the corporate bureaucracy, not efficacy and fame. And do you have any evidence that the success of those projects were due to those persons rather than the environment in which the projects were developed and supported? And before you reply, no efficacy is not productivity unless you are going to credit the original microsoft windows developers as productive as well.

Are you claiming that the people who built Windows were not productive?

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#18

Post by smcnally »

gojomo wrote: post #6

A small but important attribution note: the 'Developernomics' article was by Venkatesh Rao, author of the Ribbon Farm blog ("The Gervais Principle"). As Forbes notes: "The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer." It's possible, perhaps even likely, that another 'Forbes contributor' will write an article with a different opinion. So it's not 'Forbes' expressing an opinion that c…

Your observation is a good and material one. Not everyone will be as observant. As such, it's up to publishers to be as transparent as possible to distinguish reportage from opinion, paid content from more traditional editorial, contributions from staffers "vs" non-staffers, and what represents the voice of the publication "vs" individual contributors (regardless if they're staff or otherwise). IMO, the industry has work to do here - and Forbes is doing a good job of it so far.

(I work at Forbes; my opinions are my own.)

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#19

Post by georgemcbay »

dexen wrote: post #9

> there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, I beg to differ, using examples of Fabrice Bellard creating QEMU, Brendan Eich creating JavaScript or PG creating Arc and HN. Of course there are other examples out there, one just ought to look. Those are not tasks a single `industry average' developer or a team…

One could argue in every case other than perhaps Bellard that while maybe some programmers are 10x more productive in spurts than other programmers, they average out to a similar productivity in the end anyway. Sure, Eich created JavaScript in 10 days or whatever the story is, but as far as I can see (and I mean no disrespect to Eich here), those 10 days were an anomaly in terms of his usual output.

I can only really speak for my own experience where I do often have bursts of creative output that are extremely productive which are then often followed by days or even weeks of relatively slowish slogging maintenance work.

Am I capable of "10x" work? Yes. Can I maintain that "10x" 100% of the time. No, certainly not.

I think Joel's Salieri/Mozart point is the far greater one than whether anyone is "10x" productive -- some developers are simply capped at a certain level beyond which they lack some combination of the basic creativity and/or fundamental software engineering knowledge that would allow them to perform some task outside of their routine. If all of your developers are of that type, you're pretty fucked unless you're just producing run of the mill CRUD apps all of the time.

Re: Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics”

#20

Post by shareme »

dasil003 wrote: post #8

The evidence he cites—that there are no 10x companies—against there being 10x-median developers is weak. How would you even define the metrics to begin with? And assuming you came to a reasonable (and measurable!) definition, why would you assume that there would be companies made up entirely of super developers, and that they would retain their 10x advantage when working together even though for every other develope…

its very weak when you consider that GE is in fact a 10x company
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