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

241–250 of 419 posts

Re: Individuals Matter

#241

Post by alfiedotwtf »

rramadass wrote: post #223
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Absolutely Categorically Wrong! This has been so endlessly repeated without thought that people assume it is a fact when the Truth is far from it. Excerpts from wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model ; * In 1983 the paper was republished with a foreword by Benington explaining that the phases were on purpose organised according to the specialisation of tasks, and pointing out that the process was n…

Maybe you've never done big government contracts.

Re: Individuals Matter

#243

Post by dtech »

kragen wrote: post #199
polskibus wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opportu…

I'm not sure you can generalize from the top 0.001% like Jeff Dean to the top 10% or even 1%

Re: Individuals Matter

#244

Post by rStar »

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?

strong disagree. there exist truths on a population level. oxycontin addicts traverse similar behavioral patterns, for example. for the worst of all cognitive biases i would say confirmation bias.

Re: Individuals Matter

#245

Post by astrange »

jseban wrote: post #240
MrPatan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my experience there are plenty of -10x engineers.

That's acceptable if they're interns/juniors. If you only hire the best people for the job, you're never going to get any new people.

Re: Individuals Matter

#246

Post by deckard1 »

Jensson wrote: post #196
ahtihn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

mismanaged, yes. But also risk-adverse and encumbered with process. At a big corp you may need 5 or more sign offs on a single merge. I probably spend a good 40% of my time herding cats and babysitting the merge pipeline. There is a lot of overhead you simply won't find in a startup.

Re: Individuals Matter

#247

Post by solatic »

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…

> So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully.

There's an impedance between "Bob can do task of type A really quickly" and "we need to make sure that people other than Bob can do the task or else we have bus factor = 1 and this poses systemic risk". Clearly these goals are not really in conflict. In general, assign the work to Bob, but understand the effect on timeline in case Bob is unavailable. How long would it take if Bob isn't available? Is it worth the inefficiency from cross-training Mike? Is Mike even interested?

Modern militaries are not majority staffed by combat soldiers. Less than 10%. The rest are support of one kind or another. Smart engineering leadership in large companies, if they care about shipping on-time, eventually realize that roles like PMs are less effective if they understand themselves to be bosses and more effective if they understand themselves to be support staff.

Re: Individuals Matter

#248

Post by interroboink »

rStar wrote: post #244
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?

strong disagree. there exist truths on a population level. oxycontin addicts traverse similar behavioral patterns, for example. for the worst of all cognitive biases i would say confirmation bias.

> there exists truths on a population level.

I don't think the person you replied to was claiming otherwise. The problem is when one takes those population-level truths and blindly applies them to individuals. You might be right 80% of the time (or whatever) with that approach, but that doesn't help when you're wrong _this_ time with the specific person in front of you.

Re: Individuals Matter

#249

Post by eitland »

xvilka wrote: post #178
aahortwwy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So show me a methodology that mere mortals can implement successfully. Commit to a deliverable or a deadline, but never both.

I would say an approach closer to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would make more sense. The more information specified that can't be changed about the expected product the less information is available about the deadline, ans vice versa. Thus, the desired balance could be used depending on the situation, goals, budget, etc.

That was briliant and is already added to my quotes list.

Should I attribute it to xvilka or did you get it from somewhere else?

Re: Individuals Matter

#250

Post by bojan »

dharmab wrote: post #193
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.

> 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.

To do this you need to communicate very clearly why are you doing it, and if it will have any influence on performance reviews. But I do think that monitoring estimates in this way will affect the quality of estimates.

A manager in my previous company noted everyone's estimations during sprint planning in an Excel sheet. No-one knew why, so I found myself thinking more about that Excel sheet than about making an well-founded estimation.

Post reply on HN