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10x (engineer, context) pairs

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Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#101

Post by astrange »

dilyevsky wrote: post #38
lostdog wrote: post #4

Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to wo…

> there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. Isn’t that just really obvious truism that someone who is hyper specialized and really good in one area say video codecs is probably not a 10x’er in frontend dev? Doesn’t make it fake, still a jackpot as far as employers and probably coworkers are concerned. Unless you’re someone like…

Fabrice certainly is good but most of what people think he did in video codecs was mostly Michael Niedermayer, who is that good, but I don't think you'd also want to be a schizophrenic Austrian who can't leave his house.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#102

Post by astrange »

sinenomine wrote: post #86
lostdog wrote: post #4

Yeah, there are plenty of fake 10x engineers out there, or temporary 10x-ers who are only doing well because of their working environment. But I have worked with a few people who were clear 10x engineers. Everything they worked on they did better and faster and cleaner. They could often solve problems that other skilled people couldn't even get started on. Yes, they usually picked important and impactful things to wo…

> The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace. One could imagine a society expending not insignificant proportion of GDP on R&D towards human cognitive enhancement . Same society could allow anyone to volunteer for the corresponding enhancement programs. If one starts to ponder why we don't live in such a society, one is led to reconsider…

I think you might have overdosed on the fancy personal optimization literature and skipped the basics. Having a bigger brain metaphorically doesn't necessarily lead to productivity so much as increased ability to delude yourself.

The basics for being productive are 1. be in good shape (sleep and exercise) 2. not having to do less important stuff (someone cooks for you) 3. not having any more important stuff to do (no side business, spouse and kids don't demand more of your time).

Similarly, the best way to get moderately wealthy isn't to make a lot of complicated investments, it's to marry someone else who works and buy a house together.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#103

Post by dragonwriter »

Thiez wrote: post #97
temp8964 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I say don’t interpret 10x in a superficial silly way? A runner can be 10x better than another runner, but 10x better is not 10x faster.

When is a runner 10 times better, then? For comparison, the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time.

> the mythical 10x developer can literally do tasks in 1/10th of the time.

Every form of the idea I’ve encountered other than from people criticizing it without identifying the source of the idea they were responding to has been about 10x overall value delivery, not 10x speed on individual microbenchmark tasks.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#104

Post by andrew_ »

dgb23 wrote: post #63
andrew_ wrote: post #53

"10x engineer" is a signpost that means "run away fast" if I see it in job posts or from leadership.

Because they want you to do 10x the work for 0.8x the pay?

bingo. Kable, a new YC company, keeps posting jobs for 10x engineers. To their credit they list salary ranges, but it's towards the middle.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#105

Post by sinenomine »

khazhoux wrote: post #47
deltaonefour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The…

> I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. Th…

> Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped

To a discerning eye this pattern looks like stronger minds implementing higher quality tree search[1], either through implementing higher quality neural search heuristics for tree pruning or via greater search depth.

Given relative NP-hardness of the problems[2] we are usually dealing with at our line of work and what we know about planning in machines and animals[3], it doesn't look immediately implausible.

With planning capability strong enough, one doesn't need trial and error in the real world for moderately complex problems: the plan devised through internal search is good enough to work on the first try. Weaker planners have to compensate by executing more rollouts and using the real world as a ground truth model.

1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265

2. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

3. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.13851

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#106

Post by deltaonefour »

sinenomine wrote: post #105
khazhoux wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. Th…

> Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped To a discerning eye this pattern looks like stronger minds implementing higher quality tree search[1], either through implementing higher quality neural search heuristics for tree pruning or via greater search depth. Given relative NP-hardness of the problems[2] we are usually dealing with at our line of work and what we know about planni…

And also it implies lack of creativity.. Novel solutions lie in places that aren't part of the efficient search and can be filtered out by heuristics. Some solutions can only be found by random walk similar to biology and natural selection.

Your train of thought fits with my statement on how there are two pillars of intelligence. Creativity and "lack of brain fog"

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#107

Post by sinenomine »

astrange wrote: post #102
sinenomine wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only downside of working with them is going home and looking in the mirror and wondering why you can't match their pace. One could imagine a society expending not insignificant proportion of GDP on R&D towards human cognitive enhancement . Same society could allow anyone to volunteer for the corresponding enhancement programs. If one starts to ponder why we don't live in such a society, one is led to reconsider…

I think you might have overdosed on the fancy personal optimization literature and skipped the basics. Having a bigger brain metaphorically doesn't necessarily lead to productivity so much as increased ability to delude yourself. The basics for being productive are 1. be in good shape (sleep and exercise) 2. not having to do less important stuff (someone cooks for you) 3. not having any more important stuff to do (no…

Please don't pattern match me lazily onto typical silicon valley archetypes. I know and follow basic healthy living advice, yet it is still perfectly obvious where I'm lacking regardless. There shouldn't be this abyss between tiers of people and this burning need for verbal copes should not exist either.

Platitudes are a mind killer.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#108

Post by sinenomine »

arcanus wrote: post #45
deltaonefour wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found different. 10x engineers differentiate with normal people by lacking brain fog. They see solutions with utter clarity, sharpness and speed. This is very different from originality. They are just able to see the most logical solution while most engineers have to wander through fog to find it and many times they just can't peer past the fog to see it. This may appear like it's originality but it is not. The…

Von Neumann and Einstein's contributions to humanity are incomparable to a 10x engineer. I don't think metrics such as productivity (which 10x crudely approximates) can begin to address this level of innovation. Both unquestionably drove paradigm shifts in scientific and mathematical thinking. It's not measuring the same thing. A 10x engineer might be compared to a full tenured professor with a high citation count. E…

> can begin to address this level of innovation.

... this level of innovation? Come on, there clearly is something more profound happening here:

> Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe said "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man"

> Seeing von Neumann's mind at work, Eugene Wigner wrote, "one had the impression of a perfect instrument whose gears were machined to mesh accurately to a thousandth of an inch."

> Edward Teller admitted that he "never could keep up with him".[296] Teller also said "von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us."

Modern science has started to discern fundamental differences in neural architecture[1] and function[2] between very bright and moderately bright individuals. Surely there is a multitude of small differences, which, by virtue of adding up at the right side of the distribution's tail, bring forward a mind superior to ours.

1. https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/follow-hbp/news/brains-o...

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4052339/

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#109

Post by astrange »

sinenomine wrote: post #107
astrange wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might have overdosed on the fancy personal optimization literature and skipped the basics. Having a bigger brain metaphorically doesn't necessarily lead to productivity so much as increased ability to delude yourself. The basics for being productive are 1. be in good shape (sleep and exercise) 2. not having to do less important stuff (someone cooks for you) 3. not having any more important stuff to do (no…

Please don't pattern match me lazily onto typical silicon valley archetypes. I know and follow basic healthy living advice, yet it is still perfectly obvious where I'm lacking regardless. There shouldn't be this abyss between tiers of people and this burning need for verbal copes should not exist either. Platitudes are a mind killer.

Following it is good, but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic. It’s probably never nootropics in practice until you get past several more kinds of boring stuff.

For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids still aren’t going to be fancy chemicals, it’s going to be better air quality esp. near highways and in schools, and that’s assuming we took care of maternal nutrition.

Re: 10x (engineer, context) pairs

#110

Post by sinenomine »

astrange wrote: post #109
sinenomine wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't pattern match me lazily onto typical silicon valley archetypes. I know and follow basic healthy living advice, yet it is still perfectly obvious where I'm lacking regardless. There shouldn't be this abyss between tiers of people and this burning need for verbal copes should not exist either. Platitudes are a mind killer.

Following it is good, but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic. It’s probably never nootropics in practice until you get past several more kinds of boring stuff. For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids still aren’t going to be fancy chemicals, it’s going to be better air quality esp. near highways and in schools, and that’s assuming we took care of maternal nutriti…

> but if that’s not enough the answer is still going be something else basic.

Why should it be this way, is there a Law of the Universe mandating every human shortcoming being some regrettable lifestyle flaw?

> For instance, the best society wide interventions for kids

... it's better to avoid this beaten topic, this is not a hill I'm willing to die on today.

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