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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#111

Post by wins32767 »

The author is conflating two different things here. At large enough scale, almost everyone in a given role is practically interchangeable but there are some people who very much aren't. It's a hard leadership problem to both solve for making 99% of the staff function at a consistently high level while still carving out the exceptions for the 1% that really can move the needle at the company scale.

At a the level of a single team, nobody is interchangeable, but both reducing specialization and creating a "we're all in this together" spirit are both important goals for long term team performance (and so people can go on vacation).

Both of those problems have different solutions but can feel pretty similar when you're at the receiving end.

Re: Individuals Matter

#112

Post by xmprt »

Swizec wrote: post #29
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.

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…

I'm "10x" when working on one part of the system that I'm extremely familiar with but "1x" when it comes to other areas. Similarly, I have teammates who are "10x" in those other areas but wouldn't know where to start when it comes to my specialty.

Re: Individuals Matter

#113

Post by systemvoltage »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #58
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…

"10x" is still treating people like cogs, it's just having cogs of different size.

I like being treated like a cog instead of playing pretend-games of making me feel like a unique flower (but truth is still that I’m a cog). I prefer honesty. I prefer the brutal, unvarnished reality over executive bullshit.

A cog means I have specific responsibility and I will make sure I don't hog down the entire machine. I work well with other cogs - we mesh perfectly. Being treated like a daisy with beautiful narrative of lies would eventually lead to a delusional state of mind, dissent and ultimately negative spiraling burnout.

Former is peaceful, the latter is deceit.

Re: Individuals Matter

#115

Post by wokwokwok »

Swizec wrote: post #29
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.

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…

The irony here is that the point of the article isn’t that “10x engineers” do/don’t exist, it’s that “things are more complicated than that”.

Assigning arbitrary labels (like 10x engineers…) so it’s “easy to understand” results in over simplified models that lead to faulty decision making based on invalid assumptions.

…treating everyone equal is perhaps also a faulty assumption, but it’s easy, and dealing with complex systems is hard.

Maybe instead of bitching about equality, which is just a symptom, we should promote using complex models instead of easy trivial ones.

…because just using different easy trivial modes is stupid; it won’t get you any better outcomes.

Re: Individuals Matter

#116

Post by efitz »

I am a security engineer but have been a business leader from time to time. Business leaders often need to plan around dates- eg ”should we spend $50k announcing at conference Y in month Z, or should we wait until month A?” “Our competition just launched; will we be able to launch this quarter (the board wants to know, and we have to report material financial impact items quarterly or face SEC fines)?”

Every team I have ever worked with hates planning; every team hates their methodology and thinks it’s stupid and inaccurate and why are those pinhead business people insisting on a date; it’ll be done when it’s done.

One of the primary jobs of managers at all levels is to plan and then execute in accordance with the plan. Some managers are good at it, many aren’t- the world is populated with people nearer the center than the ends of the bell curve.

So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully. If all you can do is complain and point out unicorn 500x engineers (yeah try hiring for that characteristic, good luck), then I don’t want to hear it. But if you have a practical idea on how to “solve” planning, then you have my full attention.

Re: Individuals Matter

#117

Post by ncmncm »

iratewizard wrote: post #104
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,…

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

And, not all projects are death marches. It is generally hard to measure value, which is one of Dan Luu's points. Counting lines of code rarely produces a very good answer, but sometimes that is the best you have. Company revenue can be meaningful. When a contribution that makes the difference between $X million revenue and $0, against 250 years worth of engineers' salaries, it is hard to quibble. 500x is as good a number as you can get.

Re: Individuals Matter

#118

Post by topkai22 »

Jensson wrote: post #103
3grdlurker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, it's beyond that. I know a dev that is the most brilliant ux dev I've ever met. He can create beautiful, dynamic, understandable UIs literally 20x than I can.

However, he is just medeicore at must other tasks- constructing a common data model, scaling the backend or analyzing the data be is slower than I am, if he engages at all.

More recently I told my manager that I was intimated by how effective one of my coworkers was at his job (data science and BI.) He laughed and said my coworker basically thought the same of me (doing more standard software engineering.

Highly effective engineers are often only effective at limited aspects of the business of software engineering and it takes a good team structure of diverse talents to make everyone effective, even in the domain of software.

Re: Individuals Matter

#119

Post by fitzn »

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,…

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

- Bill Gates

Re: Individuals Matter

#120

Post by sangnoir »

ncmncm wrote: post #102
sangnoir wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It doesn't change the fact that without him no product would have been delivered.

I agree. I'm only arguing that there are times when engineers who enable "10x/100x" engineering don't get the visibility they deserve, sometimes until after they quit.

This hits close to home for me as I witnessed my partner being showered with praise for being "super productive" based on LoC alone, code which wasn't close to being production-ready. If you don't care about code quality, and want to be seen by management/people outside of your team as a 10x engineer with minimal effort: you can follow the same playbook.

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