Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

simplethread.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 745 posts

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#141

Post by knorker »

randomsearch wrote: post #83
e1g wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go-to examples of 10x developers are benevolent dictators like antirez (of Redis), evanw (of esbuild + Figma CTO), youyuxi (of Vue), Carmack, etc. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, their output is at least 10x of a typical developer at a typical company, not even counting everything these people do besides writing code. Many more are not famous but are in the same league of impact/productivity - I'm genuinely…

To pose it another way: for general software Dev (not some niche use case that only one guy understands), let’s say building websites in Vue or React, the idea of a 10x developer is that they can work in January and another, average, programmer can then spend February, March, April, May, June, July, August, and Sept… and the average guy won’t get more done? Or they come in only every other Monday and contribute as mu…

How long would it have taken you or me to write Doom, or Quake? How long would it have taken Carmack, if it'd just been him?

I think you have a false dichotomy here. Carmack isn't 10x better a C or assembly than me. But in his domain he's easily 10x smarter and more productive than me.

And on top of that, he has a quarter century more experience in graphics programming than me. That shit accumulates.

Yes, actually. In graphics programming, from 2D and software rendered, to OpenGL and VR, you could give him and me (and presumably you) any task achievable in a few human decades, and he'd do it more than 10x faster.

"Graphics programming" is not a small niche, and yes in that space he's a 10x programmer.

I think you're thinking of this the wrong way. I agree that for something as simple as "build some websites", yeah, 10x is going to be very hard. You're then just turning specs into code, pretty much.

10x programmers are those that don't waste 9 months. The hard part is knowing which 9 months out of 10, which 9 ideas and components out of 10, is waste.

For "build a web forum" or something, yeah there are no 10x programmers. Though there are many many 0.1x programmers still.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#142

Post by chii »

wccrawford wrote: post #67
chii wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can replace the word "software" with basically any other professional work and that is still the same. I don't know what you can learn from the fact that it's a social service.

I've met a lot of people who are writing code to satisfy requirements and collect a paycheck. They're good people, but just don't automatically think about the end user. They stop when the requirements are met, instead of when the user will be happy. That's what they're supposed to learn from that, IMO.

> They stop when the requirements are met, instead of when the user will be happy.

that's because they are doing software "for other humans" - aka, their manager and PM, who gave them the requirements.

So the problem is not the software engineer, but the person who creates those requirements to be fulfilled.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#143

Post by api »

I’ve been into it about 25 years. Here’s a few of mine.

1. This industry is very faddish, and many fads are designed to make money for the people driving them or lock you into someone’s ecosystem. Avoiding those is a superpower. A ton of today’s cloud native trends fit into this category. They are gateways to a paradigm where you buy a lot of things as a service at a massive markup that are relatively easy to do locally or obtain at much lower rates.

2. Simplicity is harder than complexity. Managing complexity is merely clever while eliminating it is intelligent. Eliminating it without sacrificing coverage of the problem domain is genius. There is some very interesting academic literature on the idea that intelligence is or at least heavily involves data compression (and that this is what "learning" is), so this has some basis beyond the field.

3. Unfortunately re: #2 more complex less elegant solutions often win. Many argue that this is because they capture more of the problem domain, but I often disagree. I think it's a mixture of sophomore developers being impressed by complexity (having not yet learned #2) and the fact that complexity creates industries where money can be made on adjacent software, services, and consulting. As a result of the latter complex clunky solutions can be better at building an ecosystem full of self-interested evangelists. Recent example: Kubernetes vs. the Hashicorp stack.

4. If you make something work, you are only maybe a quarter of the way to making it a product. UI/UX is the rest of the journey. UI/UX tends to not be fun, so people have to be paid to do it. This is why open source and open systems almost always fail to achieve wide adoption beyond developers and IT people. They have no economic model, so they can't hire people to make the product usable for people other than nerds.

5. Infosec people are usually afraid of the wrong things. Most breaches involve social engineering or a passive mode of entry. Infosec people like to obsess about things that are sexy like cryptography but will happily type "npm install" as root on production and pay far too little attention to security against social engineering vectors.

6. There are 10X (ish) developers just like there are 10X athletes, 10X mathematicians, 10X writers, 10X salespeople, 10X musicians, and so on. The reason many people don't believe in 10X developers is that it's so hard to objectively measure developer productivity, especially at scale.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#144

Post by e1g »

dexen wrote: post #139
e1g wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "10X" touch-typist because a) the performance limit is absolute & relatively low and b) the learning curve is such that it's easy to get to the limit and plateau. Now let's increase complexity - still typing, but you must translate the text from another language. Increase again - now you're translating poetry. Increase again - the poetry is original Shakespeare. You need to translate into contemporary Eng…

>There is no "10X" touch-typist Ironically enough your example is flawed: there are documented 10x touch-typists. The realities of the court system place high demands on the typists; the minimum required typing speed is already quite high: trained court reporter or closed captioner must write speeds of approximately 180, 200, and 225 words per minute (wpm) at very high accuracy in the categories of literary, jury cha…

You make a good point that hints at another often-undefined assumption in these discussions - 10X performance vs who, exactly? IMO, it should be vs "a typical peer in that profession". For court reporters, if "a typical peer" is a trained court reporter who averages ~200 wpm, and a superstar is at 300wpm, then it's a 1.5X gain. If a "typical peer" is a regular Joe, then 300wpm would be 10X - but this doesn't feel appropriate because we compare productivity of a "10x developer" vs a "typical developer", rather than vs "an average Facebook visitor".

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#145

Post by goto11 »

nonima wrote: post #15
boffinAudio wrote: post #7

40+ years of experience here, and I'll tell you the #1 thing I've learned: * Software is a social service. Its for other humans. Incredibly, it doesn't matter how educated the developer, they still seem to have to learn this lesson themselves, over and over, until it sinks in...

Software is whatever you want it to be. I can write software that is not for other humans. That's the most fun part of software engineering to me, when you don't care about the users and just do it just for the fun of doing it.

Almost any advice is useless if you write code purely for your own enjoyment. This is why the context is so important. If you enjoy writing convoluted unmaintainable useless code then who is to stop you? Just understand most advice does not apply to your context.

Most software development advice tacitly assume you want to write code which works and is long-term maintainable (potentially by someone other than yourself) and which fulfills some purpose beyond just the fun of writing the code.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#146

Post by pcauthorn »

e1g wrote: post #41
pjc50 wrote: post #6

This is a very insightful list. But there is one thing I'd quibble with: while it's inherently a super-subjective metric, I would say that 10x programmers do exist. Both in the "can support a company by themselves" sense and the "mad lone genius" sense. Not all the 10x programmers are good at working with other people or on other people's ideas. 0.1x programmers are often lost or afraid, although they may just be uni…

My go-to examples of 10x developers are benevolent dictators like antirez (of Redis), evanw (of esbuild + Figma CTO), youyuxi (of Vue), Carmack, etc. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, their output is at least 10x of a typical developer at a typical company, not even counting everything these people do besides writing code. Many more are not famous but are in the same league of impact/productivity - I'm genuinely…

I agree. Another example, Linus T wrote git from scratch to hosting the Linux kernel in 2.5 months. I'd say 10x is a low estimate.

I've worked with a guy who wrote great code like he was typing an email.

Everyone has a ceiling of the complexity of problems they can handle, some programmers are outliers in this regard.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#147

Post by dustintrex »

cryptica wrote: post #5

Amazingly, I agree with every single point. >> Nobody asks “why” enough This point is the most important IMO. It's so common for people to do things without asking themselves why they're doing it. Every line of code should fulfill a clear purpose. You want to avoid writing code which is difficult to explain to a non-technical person. >> People don’t really want innovation... If you believe in what you’re doing, and k…

I think "jealous" is not a useful lens here. People reject innovation because genuinely changing the way the way they have to do things is painful even if the attempt fails, and will probably lead to some people losing their jobs if it succeeds.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#148

Post by pydry »

euske wrote: post #123
boffinAudio wrote: post #7

40+ years of experience here, and I'll tell you the #1 thing I've learned: * Software is a social service. Its for other humans. Incredibly, it doesn't matter how educated the developer, they still seem to have to learn this lesson themselves, over and over, until it sinks in...

I think this applies to not just software, but engineering in general. See, science is mostly about observing the natural phenomena. On the other hand, there are jobs that are mostly about taking care of people's needs. Engineering sits in the middle. It's a mediator. We have to understand the circumstance of both sides - nature (this could be something like hardware capacity in our case) AND people. Just taking care…

It applies to every job not just engineering. I thought this was considered obvious.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#149

Post by vicda »

mosburger wrote: post #85
pjc50 wrote: post #6

This is a very insightful list. But there is one thing I'd quibble with: while it's inherently a super-subjective metric, I would say that 10x programmers do exist. Both in the "can support a company by themselves" sense and the "mad lone genius" sense. Not all the 10x programmers are good at working with other people or on other people's ideas. 0.1x programmers are often lost or afraid, although they may just be uni…

I like to say that I am a 10x developer 10% of the time. My work tends to be very "bursty" followed by long bouts of low productivity. It probably has more to do with my mental health than anything else. :/

Sounds like ADHD hyperfocus.

Re: Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer

#150

Post by dustintrex »

pcauthorn wrote: post #146
e1g wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go-to examples of 10x developers are benevolent dictators like antirez (of Redis), evanw (of esbuild + Figma CTO), youyuxi (of Vue), Carmack, etc. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, their output is at least 10x of a typical developer at a typical company, not even counting everything these people do besides writing code. Many more are not famous but are in the same league of impact/productivity - I'm genuinely…

I agree. Another example, Linus T wrote git from scratch to hosting the Linux kernel in 2.5 months. I'd say 10x is a low estimate. I've worked with a guy who wrote great code like he was typing an email. Everyone has a ceiling of the complexity of problems they can handle, some programmers are outliers in this regard.

Bit of an aside, but writing an email is its own art. Not many developers know how to write an email that a busy, non-technical VP will read, understand and act on in the way they intended. (Then again, neither do many managers.)
Post reply on HN