171–180 of 248 posts
I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…
I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…
Of course they exist. We're talking about a talent distribution here and there will be actual human beings who live in the 90th+ percentile who are demonstrably more productive, probably more than "10x", than those in the lower half.
I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…
I always thought of 10x as a qualitative description, not quantitative. There are certain inflection points where the wrong decision can cause a 10x amount of time to be wasted. One person might have the correct (but counter-intuitive) insight about whether building vs. buying is the right move for a given project. (For example.) Everyone else on the team disagrees and goes with the more obvious choice, which becomes a disaster of a project.
So I see 10x as more about wisdom and strategy, not doing 10x the work. It's not always such an large and obvious inflection point, it can be a single algorithm that can be done simply with little code or in just the opposite way. The right approach can reduce the complexity and code by 10x over time as the bugs go down, the maintenance goes down, etc.
These things add up, and over time a project under one person's leadership can easily end up with 10x the complexity, bugs, etc. for needless reasons that someone else might have avoided.
I have no doubt that the gap in value from the best developer to the average (let alone the worst) can span 10x over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I use TensorFlow, but looking at the concept and implementation, I don't think I could conceive of and write TensorFlow in 10 years of work. And this is exactly why software is eating the world. Once written it stays written and all those people that could not write something like TensorFlow if their life depended on it are able to use it as if they could . Abstraction is a super powerful thing, all this building o…
I agree very much. Just came to say that this has always been the case with the know-how of starting fires, metal molding, forging tools and weapons, inventing microscopy, large scale industrial processes, computers... software is the extension of the exponential acceleration of abstraction and reuse that our society was built on.
With e.g. metalworking, you can transfer the knowledge but training takes time. And building a new implementation of that knowledge takes time too.
But in software the knowledge and implementation is transferred effectively instantly. You can nab software off the internet (transfer knowledge) and start running it locally right now (implementation).
Software changes the complexity from O(2^N / T) to O(2^N).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once spoke to a guy that literally did not understand the lifetime scope of local variables nor how simple field assignment worked (a.x = y). I don't mean this in an esoteric, edge-case, way, but quite literally. I asked him why he didn't hire some devs to do the work for him, and his answer was "most devs are terrible and I've not found people that are as good as me". The downward range goes very, very deep. And t…
> I've personally rewritten an app in less than a week that had two devs on it for over 6 months. Their deliverable didn't really work at all, even after the 1+ minute loading time To be fair, a lot of that six months was probably just nailing down the requirements. Your rewrite enjoyed having that design work already done. I'd argue that building applications is 90% design, 10% code. The code part can balloon to a g…
Given how many clients that company had, the main conclusion I draw is that as an industry focusing on helping the .1x people improve is more likely to make a noticeable difference than chasing the other end of the spectrum.
I've never seen a 10x productivity, or even a 2x. I'd like to see one, show me a scrum where one programmer takes 10 stories on the board, and the others just did one, and he successfully finishes all 10, where the team estimated all stories to be of a full scrum length. I doubt this exist. Now, I've seen 10x quality, though sometimes they're a little slower, but never 10x slower. So maybe 1.2x to 3x times slower for…
"scrum" I found your issue. I don't think 10x developers work in places that do "scrum", as if they are some low skill assembly line worker. You think Jeff Dean does "scrum"?
No, the guy would be doing the entire project.
I've worked with "10x" programmers before, exactly one to be exact. The sort of guy who would code to an obviously-wrong spec just to annoy you as a manager, but have the "correct" implementation done and waiting to commit the second you'd amend it. It was an interesting time, and we got a lot done very rapidly. If I had talked about scrum or anything like that'd he'd take one of the other 50 job offers he could get within 24 hours making double - he worked with me because I made his life as easy as possible while trying to give him interesting work.
Of course it's not sustainable business-wise for a myriad of reasons. You can't staff a team with those people, but man was he nice to have as programmer #1 in a startup.
I had a boss 25 years ago (smart guy, did compiler work, etc. for new computer architectures) who claimed that there was really a 100x factor difference from the best to the worse. I believe this: would you rather have one day of work from Daphne Koller, Peter Norvig, or Jeff Dean - or 100 days from an average developer? Well, the answer is that "it depends." There is a ton of work that can be effectively done by non…
I had a boss 25 years ago (smart guy, did compiler work, etc. for new computer architectures) who claimed that there was really a 100x factor difference from the best to the worse. I believe this: would you rather have one day of work from Daphne Koller, Peter Norvig, or Jeff Dean - or 100 days from an average developer? Well, the answer is that "it depends." There is a ton of work that can be effectively done by non…
> I use TensorFlow, but looking at the concept and implementation, I don't think I could conceive of and write TensorFlow in 10 years of work. And this is exactly why software is eating the world. Once written it stays written and all those people that could not write something like TensorFlow if their life depended on it are able to use it as if they could . Abstraction is a super powerful thing, all this building o…
I had a boss 25 years ago (smart guy, did compiler work, etc. for new computer architectures) who claimed that there was really a 100x factor difference from the best to the worse. I believe this: would you rather have one day of work from Daphne Koller, Peter Norvig, or Jeff Dean - or 100 days from an average developer? Well, the answer is that "it depends." There is a ton of work that can be effectively done by non…
And in general, what one fool can do, another can.