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

Individuals Matter

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 419 posts

Re: Individuals Matter

#231

Post by jseban »

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…

Yeah why do people have this view on programmers I just don't understand, every other single effing job in the world requires training and ramp-up, except programmers? And the fact that programming is depending on a unique pre-existing really complex code base further speaks against this.

When my product owner quit, the new guy was working in parallel for 2 months to learn the ropes, noboby bats an eye, but a programmer is productive from day zero and all programmers have exactly the same output. It's so wrong

Re: Individuals Matter

#232

Post by rramadass »

nkoren wrote: post #229

I think the worst of all cognitive biases which humans suffer from is the belief that observations about collectives can be usefully applied to individuals. How much faulty thinking, from racism and sexism onwards, stems from this simple category error?

Well said and Insightful.

Re: Individuals Matter

#233

Post by underdeserver »

ptmcc wrote: post #195
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…

"Who can run at the top of their ability? Right. A short distance runner. You can’t run far at that speed. We programmers have figured out how to fix that, though. We just fire the start pistol every hundred yards and call it a new sprint!"

Rich Hickey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

Re: Individuals Matter

#234

Post by jseban »

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.

Well, he became 10x in the domain, and the other did not become 10x, it's not like he was born with this knowledge, he just took it more seriously and went deeper

Re: Individuals Matter

#235

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#236

Post by jseban »

systemvoltage wrote: post #113
Dylan16807 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"10x" is still treating people like cogs, it's just having cogs of different size.

I like being treated like a cog instead of playing pretend-games of making me feel like a unique flower (but truth is still that I’m a cog). I prefer honesty. I prefer the brutal, unvarnished reality over executive bullshit. A cog means I have specific responsibility and I will make sure I don't hog down the entire machine. I work well with other cogs - we mesh perfectly. Being treated like a daisy with beautiful nar…

But one of you really is a daisy, people are not equal, and those daisies are actually what's responsible for most of this machine and it's origins in the first place. Without daisies there will be no place for cogs, the cogs come after the daisies

Re: Individuals Matter

#238

Post by jll29 »

Indeed, exactly as you say, people are _not_ interchangeable - we know that already since communism relied on that false premise, viewing individuals as just “means of production”, and utterly failed.

HR as a function has increasingly become an obstacle rather than a managerial support function in recent years. Instead of personal relations with trusted, long-term people staff, employees and managers get mailing lists attended to by outsourced cheap labor call Center agents. It is CPOs’ and CEOs’ fault that they let greed cut into employee well-being that much, and of course once one company does that, all other corporations adopt the same nonsense, since they all copy playbooks.

Re: Individuals Matter

#239

Post by mro_name »

vishnugupta wrote: post #202
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…

> Details matter, You are on the money[1]. People want to estimate work without even telling what is it that needs to be done in the first place. [1] http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-...

knowing what needs to be done is impossible without considering the means at hand.

It's not just wishing for a goal - a three year old can do that - but enabling to go the way there.

But a statistical estimate may be possible indeed.

Re: Individuals Matter

#240

Post by jseban »

MrPatan wrote: post #90
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…

What you cannot say is that there are 0.1x engineers.

In my experience there are plenty of -10x engineers.
Post reply on HN