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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#141

Post by unobatbayar »

john_moscow wrote: post #56
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…

The corporate culture serves a very specific purpose of lowering the self-esteem of the 10x folks, keeping them at their place doing 10x work at 1x salary until they burn out. This is scalable, predictable, and serves management's interests well. It's just if you happen to be a 10x guy, for the sake of your own sanity, learn how to run a business and get out of the corporate swamp. Nothing else will bring you happine…

Isn't it insane that there are many 10x engineers who have created enormous amount value (creating patents, leading and executing projects, innovating etc.); Yet, the world will only know about the company or the CEO and never the engineers behind it.

Re: Individuals Matter

#142

Post by siva7 »

Kalium wrote: post #124
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. Nee…

I think most of us have been in your situation in the early days of our career. I still remember these PMs after all those years as rather inexperienced or incompetent and try to make sure that it does not happen on the teams i oversee.

Re: Individuals Matter

#143

Post by smilekzs »

Something along the lines of what was described in this article has recently been forced upon my team. You could imagine how that turned out. Hint: not very differently from the outcomes in the article...

Re: Individuals Matter

#144

Post by rramadass »

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…

>One of the primary jobs of managers at all levels is to plan and then execute in accordance with the plan

"Plans" can never be set in stone. They evolve based on the people involved and circumstances. A Manager's job is to understand his people and then Plan accordingly; not the other way around.

>If all you can do is complain

This is exactly the wrong way to frame the discussion. Pointing out that you are clueless is not complaining but raising issues which if unaddressed, will most probably result in failure of what is attempted.

Re: Individuals Matter

#145

Post by Jensson »

3grdlurker wrote: post #140
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.

But then you have to ask what metrics are being used to define a 10x engineer. You’ll see that everyone has a different version of that and therefore whether a 10x engineer exists solely depends on the ontological argument for a 10x engineer. By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

If you can replace an entire team of 10 engineers paid to work on something with a single engineer then that engineer is a 10x engineer, as long as the "10x engineer" didn't originally write the things they work with. That is my definition.

> By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

Replacing 10 salaries with 1 salary isn't subjective at all.

Re: Individuals Matter

#146

Post by [deleted] »

Swizec wrote: post #81
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…

> will stumble under the right circumstances Exactly. Not every task or goal fits every person equally well. A good leader understands this and does their best to find that fit. But it is in my experience not considered okay to talk about this too openly because people get offended. You wouldn’t ask your best engineer to lead a marketing campaign or your best marketer to design your servers. They’re smart and would f…

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#147

Post by wreath »

wffurr wrote: post #77
andrewflnr wrote: post #42

This is cathartic to read, but I also despair at getting the people who need to hear it to take it seriously. > But many people want the world to be simple This is the source of so much insanity in the world, not just with regard to allocating labor. Details matter, but people who plan "timelines" desperately don't want to hear it. They can go through whole careers without being forced out of the cozy illusion that t…

There's a great book about this called "Seeing Like a State".

I cannot recommend this book enough.

Re: Individuals Matter

#148

Post by grayclhn »

xmprt wrote: post #112
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…

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.

You make it sound like you shouldn’t get credit for knowing where you provide the most value and putting yourself in position to be most effective. :)

Re: Individuals Matter

#149

Post by throwawaygh »

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…

Oh, I misinterpreted GP. Yes, agreed: for small software shops, the key senior ICs are probably worth more than the company itself.

Re: Individuals Matter

#150

Post by 3grdlurker »

Jensson wrote: post #145
3grdlurker wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have to ask what metrics are being used to define a 10x engineer. You’ll see that everyone has a different version of that and therefore whether a 10x engineer exists solely depends on the ontological argument for a 10x engineer. By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

If you can replace an entire team of 10 engineers paid to work on something with a single engineer then that engineer is a 10x engineer, as long as the "10x engineer" didn't originally write the things they work with. That is my definition. > By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs. Replacing 10 salaries with 1 salary isn't subjective at all.

Of course it is subjective. This is literally what you said:

> That is my definition.

You obviously care about optimizing for salary expenses. Most companies have room to hire more people who can do a few things well, so their definition of 10x would be different because they’ll have different expectations of their employees.

And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

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