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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#191

Post by mostertoaster »

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.

So y’all don’t disagree with the main point.

There are some specific individual engineers who will get a specific individual task, faster than some other specific engineers.

If those same specific engineers get done many general tasks faster than another group of specific engineers on general tasks than they are just better in general. If some other specific task gets done by the other specific engineers better then it is just different domains.

Either way the individuals matter.

Re: Individuals Matter

#192

Post by atoav »

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…

I can't really speak about managment here, but when I organize projects the three most important things are:

1. Create the room for every member of the team to comfortably do their job (what this means depends on the persons needs and at the work environment, communication structure, tools you provide them). Room not only means physical room, but also time, frame of mind etc. If everybody has 10 other daily things on their list they won't have the (mental) room to work on the project.

2. Communicate clearly why you think this is a workable plan and ask for feedback whether this is realistic. Communicate what happens if you are faster, what happens if you are slower. They are helping you, you are helping them, ideally both sides take away something from the project beyond purely finishing it.

3. Adapt, Improvise, Overcome. The primary goal should always be to finish the project in a good way, especially if the deadline is not a hard deadline, but one arbitrarily set by someone else. Defend the team, create the room for them. Don't let them slack around too much. A bit of slacking around is not too much, but precisely the right amount – this is the space needed if something goes terribly wrong.

Re: Individuals Matter

#193

Post by dharmab »

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…

A technique I read once (and lost the link) was to track both the estimated time metrics and the error in estimation for every engineer. Over time you could build reasonable error bars around every engineer's estimations, and then sum the estimates _with the confidence intervals_ together and figure out the probability of achieving a certain ship date.

Re: Individuals Matter

#194

Post by ahtihn »

ncmncm wrote: post #95
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,…

The person who told me about this was the person who counted up the code at the end of the project. And, yes, it was 250 from each, not 500 from each parent company. (Memory is funny that way.) I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer. As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two week…

That's a ridiculously wasteful way of managing work. I too can be a 10000000x engineer if I never let others actually merge their code and just write it myself instead.

Re: Individuals Matter

#195

Post by ptmcc »

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.

Completely agree, and reminds me of how much I hate the common Agile terminology of "sprints".

Sprints are an extraordinary effort and are by definition not sustainable. If you run a sprint, you have to recover for at least as long before returning to baseline.

I know it's just a word and doesn't literally mean to sprint, but I feel like it still subtly infects how development is viewed and approached. Even replacing it with something like "iterations" still implies that every 2-3 week period is cookie-cutter and predictable.

Re: Individuals Matter

#196

Post by Jensson »

ahtihn wrote: post #194
ncmncm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who told me about this was the person who counted up the code at the end of the project. And, yes, it was 250 from each, not 500 from each parent company. (Memory is funny that way.) I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer. As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two week…

That's a ridiculously wasteful way of managing work. I too can be a 10000000x engineer if I never let others actually merge their code and just write it myself instead.

If you hired engineers like they hired them before coding interviews combined with a decade of the dead sea effect I can easily see a team of 500 barely getting anything done at all. Big organizations are often grossly mismanaged like this which is why smaller organizations can beat them.

Re: Individuals Matter

#197

Post by [deleted] »

fitzn wrote: post #119
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,…

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

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#198

Post by alfiedotwtf »

rramadass wrote: post #144
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…

> "Plans" can never be set in stone

Setting plans in stone was the entire Waterfall Methodology where contracts had requirements and milestones locked in and any deviation meant heavy penalties.

Re: Individuals Matter

#199

Post by kragen »

polskibus wrote: post #164
john_moscow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

People often forget that the 10x guy is 10x only in the domain he’s been working on, and many chores has been taken away from him by his manager and given to someone else. It is fairly easy to make a 10x someone closer to a 1x just by changing his tasks and giving more chores like CR, bug fixes, more mundane features or GUI etc. Sure it will often be better quality but in areas where it matters less.

Jeff Dean was 10x when he wrote EPI INFO, he was 10x when he worked on profilers at DEC WRL, he was 10x when he and Sanjay Ghemawat wrote MapReduce, and he was 10x when they rewrote Google's search indexer. Maybe 1000x or 10000x, really. It's true that part of that was that he worked on things that mattered instead of things that didn't, and he could have found himself in a situation where he didn't have that opportunity. But it's clearly not just productivity in a single domain, and it's not because someone else was fixing all his bugs.

Re: Individuals Matter

#200

Post by teddyh »

3grdlurker wrote: post #136
csande17 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be said—I’m sure you have the freedom to say that to people if you’re prepared for the consequences. When people say that "you aren't allowed to say" something, they don't mean the government uses magical mind control rays to prevent your mouth from physically producing the words. "Consequences" are the mechanism by which speech is prohibited i…

I mean, I get your point about the government but now you’re just complaining about how being insensitive to other people has the consequence of them fighting back.

Now you’re moving to assume that everything that has consequences is due to somebody being insensitive. It could also be, for example, that the person initiating consequences is entirely too sensitive.
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