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Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

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Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#11

Post by edw519 »

lionhearted wrote: post #10
edw519 wrote: post #4

"Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive." Mediocre programmers are expensive. Good programmers are the bargain of the century. If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work, do it right, and do it so that it can be maintained reasonably, Jeff Atwood's tradeoff would become moot. But companies generally don't do this, which is pro…

100% agreement, yet: > If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work... Very few people have such a good eye for talent. It's really, really hard to do. Jack Welch, one of the better HR people of all time, said his hiring success rate was only 2 out of 3 hires working out even towards the end of his tenure. It's really hard to identify…

"Very few people have such a good eye for talent."

That's OK because it's not necessary.

Management doesn't need an eye for talent. It needs an eye for demonstrated performance.

If Programmer A consistently delivers excellent software in x% of the time of Programmers B thru G, the users/customers love it, and the maintenance costs are a small % (if they have a way of measuring this), then what the f*&#%@ else does management need to know? Treat Programmer A appropriately or lose him/her.

Talent is in the eye of the beholder.

Demonstrated performance is on the bottom line.

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#13

Post by wglb »

edw519 wrote: post #11
lionhearted wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreement, yet: > If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work... Very few people have such a good eye for talent. It's really, really hard to do. Jack Welch, one of the better HR people of all time, said his hiring success rate was only 2 out of 3 hires working out even towards the end of his tenure. It's really hard to identify…

"Very few people have such a good eye for talent." That's OK because it's not necessary. Management doesn't need an eye for talent. It needs an eye for demonstrated performance. If Programmer A consistently delivers excellent software in x% of the time of Programmers B thru G, the users/customers love it, and the maintenance costs are a small % (if they have a way of measuring this), then what the f*&#%@ else does ma…

But do managers know how to measure performance? Really?

In an enterprise situation, for example, do "customers" really know if they love the software, or the presentation that sold them the idea, or perhaps they asked for something to be built wrong.

I would suggest that "very few managers have such a good eye for performance" no matter the metric.

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#14

Post by wglb »

One item left out is floor space. This is a serious consideration, maybe more serious than electricity. Real estate for your server racks has a cost associated with it, and it is not so easy to buy/rent in rack-sized increments.

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#15

Post by marcusbooster »

edw519 wrote: post #11
lionhearted wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agreement, yet: > If companies would just wise up enough to pay a good programmer 3 times as much as a mediocre programmer to do 10 times the work... Very few people have such a good eye for talent. It's really, really hard to do. Jack Welch, one of the better HR people of all time, said his hiring success rate was only 2 out of 3 hires working out even towards the end of his tenure. It's really hard to identify…

"Very few people have such a good eye for talent." That's OK because it's not necessary. Management doesn't need an eye for talent. It needs an eye for demonstrated performance. If Programmer A consistently delivers excellent software in x% of the time of Programmers B thru G, the users/customers love it, and the maintenance costs are a small % (if they have a way of measuring this), then what the f*&#%@ else does ma…

Demonstrated performance on what? A padded resume? A minimal contribution to a well known large project?

Or is your ideal company one that hires 100 programmers to perform the same task and then fire the bottom 95% after a code review? You're assuming the company has already hired all-star talent (accidentally?) and just needs to pay off their demands. What happens when this all-star leaves to balloon across the world - how do you find a replacement?

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#16

Post by access_denied »

wglb wrote: post #13
edw519 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Very few people have such a good eye for talent." That's OK because it's not necessary. Management doesn't need an eye for talent. It needs an eye for demonstrated performance. If Programmer A consistently delivers excellent software in x% of the time of Programmers B thru G, the users/customers love it, and the maintenance costs are a small % (if they have a way of measuring this), then what the f*&#%@ else does ma…

But do managers know how to measure performance? Really? In an enterprise situation, for example, do "customers" really know if they love the software, or the presentation that sold them the idea, or perhaps they asked for something to be built wrong. I would suggest that "very few managers have such a good eye for performance" no matter the metric.

When I was a low-level employee using custom-built SAP crap, I could have easily lost my job if I dare suggest an "improvement" on the software.

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#18

Post by ankp »

patio11 wrote: post #3

If you have upgraded all your servers without consolidating, year after year, you will notice that your electricity bill is going through the roof. I don't know, you can buy an awful lot of electricity for an hour of my time, and I'm cheap ... I think the largest deployment my day job supports probably causes an electricity bill in the hundreds a year range. If you had a meeting between one PL and two engineers to di…

It's not cheap, and you don't have to be Google for it to matter. Most of the time, the costs are just non-obvious to engineering.

Here are some rough numbers.

Power for a single 48U rack usually runs $200-$300/month for two 20amp circuits (possibly +2 for redundancy). A modern 1U server draws anywhere from (roughly) 1.66 to 2.5 amps, and you can only use 80% of a circuit's maximum supported load due to safety regulations, resulting in a total supported count of between 12 to 19 mid-range servers per rack. Higher-end servers have a significantly increased power draw, but potentially higher efficiency, and there can be a significant advantage to leveraging multi-core systems.

In addition to rackspace and power, each server must obviously be connected to the network. The switches draw enough power to potentially decrease the number of supported servers.

Each rack costs roughly $500/month (plus power), and often requires advanced provisioning to ensure that rackspace is available, and if possible, located in the same area. It's not unusual to buy an entire block of space well ahead of actual use to ensure that the business' growth can be accommodated.

Additionally, one requires an operations staff to maintain the servers. Hard drives fail, backups must be done, hardware must be ordered, tested, and finally, deployed. Simple deployment of a single server, including the networking configuration, travel time, and physical work can easily consume 4-8 hours of operations staff time.

When you add together the operational and capital expenditures, I'm not really convinced that the idea is so simple as "servers are cheap, programmers are expensive". Servers, electricity, physical space, and the labor necessary to install and maintain them are not particularly cheap.

I'd propose a new mantra: programmers are expensive, and so are servers and IT, and so let's try to not be monomaniacally flippant about it. Software can be easy to write AND perform reasonably well, and to say otherwise simply appears to be a false dichotomy fronted by those who benefit from it most.

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#19

Post by al3x »

This is good advice. ankp's comment is also good advice.

A well-run technical organization shouldn't have to choose between good programmers, code that performs, and the ability to quickly operationalize new hardware when necessary. If you're having to choose, you've got more work to do.

Re: Jeff Atwood is wrong about performance

#20

Post by sho »

Nice straw man. Did anyone ever try to say that it's not worth fixing a 1000x-slowdown error because "we'll just buy 1000 times the hardware, that's cheaper!"?

Obviously there is a balance somewhere between pointless, unmaintainable, expensive over-optimisation on one end and programmer incompetence, bad tool choices and ignorance of hardware limitations on the other.

There will be a sweet spot in the middle, possibly different for all projects, which just has to be figured out by experienced people who knows what they're doing. Why all this trying to take "sides"? It's like getting all fired up about which is "better", planes or ships. They are both good for different purposes, choose the one that fits your need!

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