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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#291

Post by markus_zhang »

jseban wrote: post #231
Kalium wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 program…

I think it depends on the culture of the company. Some companies do allow engineers say a month to catch up.

Re: Individuals Matter

#292

Post by kortilla »

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.

This is just a redressing of the same “everyone is just as good” bullshit. Some people get a fuckload more work done because they go down the right design paths to start with, know how to work effectively, know what pieces to skip, etc.

The same is true in nearly every field. Programming is not special.

Re: Individuals Matter

#293

Post by markus_zhang »

For large corporations I think it inevitably people with a C title regard troopers in the trench as mere numbers, just as a general does. He has to because his mindset doesn't allow otherwise. For such a large entity to survive, the leader has to have a "collective" mindset.

My recommendation is to move to smaller companies/organizations so that individuals may be treated more independently (regardless of whether their job matters or not).

Re: Individuals Matter

#294

Post by underdeserver »

ozim wrote: post #266

One thing missing is that author is assuming that talented people will like to work in one place indefinitely. With developers skipping boat every ~2 years on average how do you make sure you will keep such person in-house. You can compensate people only up to some level but as they got bored or feel they can do something better with their time they will move. Not to mention family reasons or whatever else can happen…

In my view skipping boat every ~2 years on average is the result of a bad situation. Maybe people feel they have to do that to increase their comp or advance in their career, but I'd much rather stay in one place for 5-10 years growing it and growing with it.

I'd also wager that a good workplace that provides autonomy, fair compensation, strong peers and a good atmosphere will not see 2-year average attrition.

Re: Individuals Matter

#295

Post by bob229 »

Is this moronically awful website meant to be funny? Maybe this guy has something good to say but I’ll never know as the site is unreadable

Re: Individuals Matter

#296

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I tend to enjoy the topics that Dan Luu discusses, but his "wall o' text" presentation can be somewhat intimidating. It's better on a computer, than on an iPad.

He's absolutely correct. I'm not sure that anyone in the industry (that can do something about it) cares, though.

Nothing will change, until C-suite pocketbooks start getting impacted. As long as people are willing to pay for the type of software generated by organizations that treat ICs as "LEGO blocks," then it will continue.

For myself, I care -deeply- about the Quality of my work. I. Simply. Cannot. Bring. Myself. To. Write. Crap.

Since no one is interested in paying me to do it, I write for free. I'm very fortunate that I am able to do this.

Re: Individuals Matter

#297

Post by radicalbyte »

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…

That engineer is Senior in title only. Unfortunately this is a common pattern - a mid-level developer will play "hero", make a mess that only they understand, and - if given the title/responsibility by immature management - proceed to royally screw their team.

Actual Seniors have the experience and foresight to handle this properly. Either build code with enough documentation/tests that others can understand it, or make an onboarding/mentoring plan for team mates, or estimate based on a teammate doing the work.

In this position: the engineering manager should remove the fake Senior from the team, that will force them to get up to speed.

Re: Individuals Matter

#298

Post by jpgvm »

lucidbee wrote: post #180

I think there is a structural problem here that we are avoiding. The reason some higher ups don't see the merit of particular individual developers is that their pay does not reflect their contribution. Pay is the simple metric that should reflect worth, but we don't use 10x or 100x pay scales. We are failing to pay stars and superstars in accordance with the value they contribute to company. profits.

This is something I fail to understand. no-one blinks an eye when proposing a high performing CEO he compensated appropriately but propose the same for an engineer and everyone looks at you funny unless you give them a VP title and saddle them with a bunch of non-technical responsibilities in the process. If an engineer is the crucial individual in creating and delivering a product that the companies profits are derived from they should also receive appropriate performance based compensation in line with senior management, perhaps even more as senior management is definitely more fungible (namely C level roles like CFO, etc).

Re: Individuals Matter

#299

Post by gadrev »

> The roadmap creation and review process maintains the polite fiction that people are interchangeable, but everyone knows this isn't true and teams that are effective and want to ship on time can't play along when the rubber hits the road even if they play along with the managers, directors, and VPs, who create roadmaps as if people can be generically abstracted over.

Agreed, and this breaks down when there's a large deviation from the mean for any particular team member, where the mean isn't necessarily some sort of "average", but more like what the rest of the organization has become used to in terms of productivity from that team/department.

But if the "polite fiction" enforcement resists this reality, it comes out in all sort of undesirable ways. It's... not nice.

Re: Individuals Matter

#300

Post by Gentil »

Interestingly enough, the pay for these individuals differ too. And this matters as well. We should be taught to negotiate. This is the most underrated thing our industry and seniors don't tell juniors of the field.

I learned this the hard way. After 5 years when the company was winding down, I learnt 5 colleagues of varied gender and race who were my colleagues were paid shit ton more than me. I know this is a sensitive topic. But if you ask, they will pay more or you will know how much you are worth. I thought the system will acknowledge and reward accordingly after I got a surprising bonus. IT DOES NOT. You have to fight for it. I felt really betrayed. And this is when everyone told me how and when to negotiate.

From the moment you are hired, you bargain for a better pay. That itself, from that starting period itself, your pay differs compared to the other person who may have been hired with you. Then not everyone takes the same effort (they can't or don't want to for varied reasons). But some people do a 9 to 5, the other people does late nights, some people are dettached from company and it's vision, some are are very loyal. It depends on individuals and their circumstances.

Handling everyone the same way doesn't work. This discourages people who want to put in more effort. So they jump ship and move to another company for a better pay. No person want the same amount of pay, they all want more. And the answer is negotiate. And ditch and make some noise on companies which have stereotype pay. Trust me. It is not the right place for you to work.

Imagine this, giving $1 million dollar to ten people and see how much money they all have after a year. It will all be very different for each of them. It will not be the same amount. That is the same for salaries, you salary at this point are based on how much you worked and how much you bargained. It won't be the same for another person with same experience and same background. It just won't be.

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