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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#121

Post by Jensson »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #80
throwawaygh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really true for small companies? A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. It's hard to find numbers for the value of small software businesses (OP's quote), but this article [1] puts the number at $667k. If that's true, the engineer is…

> A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. Those discounts are why it's easier to poach the employees. If a company has 10 engineers earning $200K/year, why would you buy the company for $667K per person and then pay the employees on top of th…

Salary is per year, buying a company is a one time cost. Retention agreements are a part of the purchase so they know the employees they got will be forced to stick around if the purchase goes through.

Re: Individuals Matter

#123

Post by tomnipotent »

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…

A 10x'er is by definition an outlier. It would be absolutely silly for a business to build its planning on the existence of outliers in its staff, unless the company is small (People leave companies for other opportunities even when they like their current job. I have to plan for that, whether it hurts someone's ego or not.

Re: Individuals Matter

#124

Post by Kalium »

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.

I got a harsh lesson about this in one of my very first jobs.

A senior engineer on my team had built a rather complicated system. He was accordingly intimately familiar with all aspects of it. So when he estimated something on that system, it came with nearly all the discovery work already done.

The PM proceeded to take an estimate from this person, hand it to a brand new hire, and expect them to deliver on that. Needless to say it could have gone better for me.

Re: Individuals Matter

#125

Post by mbot5324 »

mrandish wrote: post #26
kasey_junk wrote: post #12

One thing that I always think is undervalued is how variable a single persons output is. A bad day, illness, life changes, etc all dramatically impact a person’s efficiency. Treating even the same persons output as abstract is fraught with issues. One month a rockstar the next a schlub.

Some of the most capable people I've ever worked with have been "bursty" in that they would go through intense periods of high value output and then need to almost go dormant for a while to reset. As long as the "high value" phase was uniquely and significantly valuable it wasn't a problem so long as management understood and planned their assignments appropriately.

I'd like to think I'm capable, but whatever I am, it's certainly bursty with periods of dormancy. To the other comment, it's probably on the bipoloar spectrum. Some of it is self-inflicted. Most of it isn't.

Before covid, I'd had 2 managers who knew something of what I was dealing with and gave me the space to deal with it and encouragement that my work was good enough often enough not to worry. With some 5+ other managers, I believe I successfully masked it and that it would have threatened my job had I failed.

In the remote world, it takes almost no work at all to manage around my work schedule. I don't even feel like I'm masking anything, just living. Weirdest part is I've now fallen into a far more social role.

Who would have thought remote work had such hidden benefits?

/...almost everyone

Re: Individuals Matter

#126

Post by wyclif »

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…

HR didn't care that the person made the company more money than HR saves by doing location adjustments for all international employees combined because HR at the company had no notion of the value of an employee, only the cost, title, level, and location

This is common in large, dumb corporations: HR is the Blob. And if you are being recruited by a company that exemplifies that kind of culture, run away, far, far away.

Re: Individuals Matter

#127

Post by Afforess »

efitz wrote: post #116

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 h…

This mentality of thinking is exactly the problem, I think. You want a tool that can solve an entire class of problems. We are telling you that no such tool can exist to do what you want, the problem and the tools don't work that way. Each project should be planned as a snowflake. Each project is different. Each team is unique. Every individual performs differently, even one day to the next. Stop looking for this tool to make these plans. It can't exist.

Do the hard thing and plan projects individually.

Re: Individuals Matter

#128

Post by ncmncm »

sangnoir wrote: post #120
ncmncm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Agreed. It is rare that you can get objectively meaningful numbers. So, while it is convenient that half the code delivered was his, that is not the meaningful measure.

When I was in school, the standard for engineer productivity was 10 lines of tested code per day, averaged. Maybe we do better today, with fewer footguns and faster compilers. But we expect more meaningful results from a line of code, too.

Re: Individuals Matter

#129

Post by Jensson »

topkai22 wrote: post #118
Jensson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cow…

That was my point, arguments such as yours are just arguing with strawmen. 10x is compared to another professional in the same domain. Saying that the engineer isn't as effective at another domain as a professional of that other domain is arguing with a strawman.

Re: Individuals Matter

#130

Post by aahortwwy »

efitz wrote: post #116

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 h…

> So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully.

Commit to a deliverable or a deadline, but never both.

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