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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#101

Post by pseudalopex »

ncmncm wrote: post #95
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail,…

The person who told me about this was the person who counted up the code at the end of the project. And, yes, it was 250 from each, not 500 from each parent company. (Memory is funny that way.) I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer. As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two week…

> If the work was not ready at the end of two weeks, he wrote it himself over the weekend.

Using no code or knowledge from the past 2 weeks?

Re: Individuals Matter

#102

Post by ncmncm »

sangnoir wrote: post #98
ncmncm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

LoC is a terrible metric - did they count the lines other engineers removed? I was half of a very productive duo on a greenfield project subsystem - a project I joined midway: my partner wrote a lot of code, I estimate ~70% of final lines in the code base were his. What the LoC count won't tell you is all the refactoring, deletion, tests and error handling code I had to add, because his code only worked for the happy…

When the numbers are large enough, the details don't matter much. Maybe he is really only a 250x engineer? A 100x engineer? It doesn't change the fact that without him no product would have been delivered.

Re: Individuals Matter

#103

Post by Jensson »

3grdlurker wrote: post #66
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent. It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be…

> Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent.

Right, the 10x engineer isn't benching 10x more than you or running 10x faster than you, nobody thinks that 10x engineer means 10x at every possible task.

Re: Individuals Matter

#104

Post by iratewizard »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88
ncmncm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

> I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail,…

I remember a day when one of my engineer's full days of work was one line of code. Not all lines of code are made equal

Re: Individuals Matter

#105

Post by ncmncm »

pseudalopex wrote: post #101
ncmncm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who told me about this was the person who counted up the code at the end of the project. And, yes, it was 250 from each, not 500 from each parent company. (Memory is funny that way.) I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer. As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two week…

> If the work was not ready at the end of two weeks, he wrote it himself over the weekend. Using no code or knowledge from the past 2 weeks?

That would have taken longer.

Re: Individuals Matter

#106

Post by lostcolony »

ncmncm wrote: post #82
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

Maybe he was an amazing engineer 100s of times better than anyone else on the project...or maybe he was a bottleneck for everyone else.

The latter I've seen. A lot. The former I have not.

Re: Individuals Matter

#107

Post by pseudalopex »

ncmncm wrote: post #105
pseudalopex wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the work was not ready at the end of two weeks, he wrote it himself over the weekend. Using no code or knowledge from the past 2 weeks?

That would have taken longer.

Using it or not using it would have taken longer?

Re: Individuals Matter

#108

Post by csande17 »

3grdlurker wrote: post #66
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent. It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be…

> It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be said—I’m sure you have the freedom to say that to people if you’re prepared for the consequences.

When people say that "you aren't allowed to say" something, they don't mean the government uses magical mind control rays to prevent your mouth from physically producing the words. "Consequences" are the mechanism by which speech is prohibited in societies without access to magical mind control rays.

(Not to pick on you specifically; I've heard this line a lot lately.)

Re: Individuals Matter

#109

Post by Jensson »

sangnoir wrote: post #96
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

Isn't the "10x" label contingent on engineers being functionally indistinguishably, except some are allegedly 10x more productive? Specialization is what I figure has highest impact on turnaround times in a team setting. Just because an engineer is the most familiar with a component/subsystem - which allows them to make changes to that subsystem faster, doesn't make them an all round 10x engineer.

It refers to people with the same experience with the system. For example, lets say you have two persons working with a system and have worked with it for two years. One of them is 10x as productive in that system than the other. Neither of them had experience with such systems prior to this, so both were equally productive when they started, but one of them grew much faster and is now 10x the other.

Of course if you took those two and put them to work at a new system both would have 0 productivity initially as they learn the new system, but as they grow the differences starts to appear and soon you have a very stark contrast again.

Re: Individuals Matter

#110

Post by dpweb »

paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

In my manager days I simply assigned a factor to each team member based on the type of work, so one person may be baseline hrs * 1 and another hrs *.8

This had to be accurate, as it’s consulting, if the hours are wrong we lose money.

But only a direct line manager can do this, anyone else won’t have the knowledge of the staffs capabilities.

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