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The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

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Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#31

Post by yummyfajitas »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #29
yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to be some ideological motivation for claiming rockstars don't exist. The existence of rockstars provides fodder for individualist ideologies. Many people are more collectivist, so therefore feel the need to dispute the existence of rockstars. This is a little bit evident here - you need a rockstar team, with diversity . It's far more evident in the last post on this same topic. (Not quite a dupe, bu…

> No programmer is worth more than any other I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is: - No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average). - A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies". Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "N…

Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is a straight-up straw man.

It's an exaggeration (I probably should have been more clear), not a straw man. Obviously big corporations have different levels of engineers, but many of them claim engineers top out at a certain point. Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this. If programmers max out at being only 3x better than average (or whatever the multiplier is), to get beyond that level one needs to be a manager.

Interestingly, tech companies, trading desks, and other places where technology really matters frequently don't view things this way.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#32

Post by wslh »

dexen wrote: post #26

After reading numerous posts on the subject of 10x software engineers, I reckon they fall mostly into two categories: - `I have worked with / seen code of such ones' (often examples follow) - `there were no such ones on any team I ever managed' , with OP falling into this category. Which is to say, the existence (or absence) of 10x software engineers appears to be party recognition problem -- managers do not want to…

First, is important to search the truth. I think we are discussing if 1 + 1 is equal to 2 or not. 10X engineers exist (I would say that 100X ones too). If you found even one it is enough to probe this fact.

You can see similar distributions with scientists or other professionals.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#34

Post by bostik »

wesnerm2 wrote: post #30
bostik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rockstars programmers exist Of course they do. The laws of probability ensure that. People and their traits usually follow a normal ("bell curve") distribution. Some individuals are at +2.5 standard deviations, and some even at +3.0 but they are rare. Using the table from http://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution-... we can get some nice numbers to show just how rare they are. A +2.5 developer is…

You're mistaken about the laws of probability. The normal distribution arises from sums of the same distribution. This is most frequently found in sample averages, which is . More accurately, sample averages follow a student T distribution, which converges to a normal distribution as sample size increases to infinity. In general, humans do not follow a bell curve for complex traits. For instance, it's common to see b…

> In general, humans do not follow a bell curve for complex traits. [...] Also based on the Chebyshev's inequality,...

Thank you, this was very helpful. After some quick searches and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality I now also know where the "off by square root of sample size" rule comes from.

I stand corrected and very happily so.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#35

Post by yummyfajitas »

wesnerm2 wrote: post #30
bostik wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rockstars programmers exist Of course they do. The laws of probability ensure that. People and their traits usually follow a normal ("bell curve") distribution. Some individuals are at +2.5 standard deviations, and some even at +3.0 but they are rare. Using the table from http://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution-... we can get some nice numbers to show just how rare they are. A +2.5 developer is…

You're mistaken about the laws of probability. The normal distribution arises from sums of the same distribution. This is most frequently found in sample averages, which is . More accurately, sample averages follow a student T distribution, which converges to a normal distribution as sample size increases to infinity. In general, humans do not follow a bell curve for complex traits. For instance, it's common to see b…

Not only that, he seems to be conflating standard deviations with productivity multipliers (I'm not exactly sure how to translate his +2 to productivity, I could be misinterpreting), which is definitely wrong.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#36

Post by bulatb »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #29
yummyfajitas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also seems to be some ideological motivation for claiming rockstars don't exist. The existence of rockstars provides fodder for individualist ideologies. Many people are more collectivist, so therefore feel the need to dispute the existence of rockstars. This is a little bit evident here - you need a rockstar team, with diversity . It's far more evident in the last post on this same topic. (Not quite a dupe, bu…

> No programmer is worth more than any other I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is: - No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average). - A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies". Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "N…

In the observation that kicked off the meme, a 10x engineer was someone who was 10x more productive than the least productive members of the team, not 10x more productive than the average.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#37

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

bulatb wrote: post #36
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No programmer is worth more than any other I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is: - No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average). - A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies". Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "N…

In the observation that kicked off the meme, a 10x engineer was someone who was 10x more productive than the least productive members of the team, not 10x more productive than the average.

Yeah. If the least productive member of the team is clueless and gets nothing done, then a competent programmer is literally infinitely more productive than that. It's not a very well-calibrated metric.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#38

Post by [deleted] »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #27
dexen wrote: post #26

After reading numerous posts on the subject of 10x software engineers, I reckon they fall mostly into two categories: - `I have worked with / seen code of such ones' (often examples follow) - `there were no such ones on any team I ever managed' , with OP falling into this category. Which is to say, the existence (or absence) of 10x software engineers appears to be party recognition problem -- managers do not want to…

There also seems to be some ideological motivation for claiming rockstars don't exist. The existence of rockstars provides fodder for individualist ideologies. Many people are more collectivist, so therefore feel the need to dispute the existence of rockstars. This is a little bit evident here - you need a rockstar team, with diversity . It's far more evident in the last post on this same topic. (Not quite a dupe, bu…

[deleted]

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#39

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No programmer is worth more than any other I don't think that's what's being said. IMHO the message is: - No programmer is worth 10x the average. (though some might be worth 1/10 * the average). - A high-functioning team is more important than a high-functioning individual, and these two are sometimes at odds if you give free rein to the "individualist ideologies". Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "N…

Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is a straight-up straw man. It's an exaggeration (I probably should have been more clear), not a straw man. Obviously big corporations have different levels of engineers, but many of them claim engineers top out at a certain point. Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x…

> Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this

Those claims are debatable and often true, not always true. As opposed to straw men which aren't even debatable.

I've seen less actual 10* engineers and more high-functioning individualistic coders who maintain whole systems on their own, and at some point leave the company (most people change jobs at some point, but in their case it was accompanied by "nobody understands what I do" noises) whereupon it's unmaintainable (in one case, running on their dev machine against explicit instruction with no source or login details).

Your company may hit the jackpot and hire a budding Linus Torvalds or John Carmack, but the odds are bad and the guy who thinks he's a rockstar is more likely to be a good coder, but an egotistical person. Lots of actual musician rockstars are assholes too.

A well-functioning team is a much better bet. Lottery tickets are a poor investment.

I know that trading desks may disagree, but IMHO that's a defect of the stock-market gambling culture that they come from (where someone's guaranteed to beat the market this year. Find them and call them a genius!). I've worked in various tech companies, and that mindset is not universal there. It's not even welcome to me.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#40

Post by Jugurtha »

Well, you can't get into electronics and not hear about Bob Widlar, Jim Williams or Bob Pease..

There is such a thing as rockstar engineer. The thing they had in common though was that they're really good, yet are kind on others. They were also extravagent, but that's just who they were. Read about how Jim Williams behaved during his interview, and you'd see what I mean (for the less curious, he was in shorts and sandals, moved really close to the recruiter and started to interrogate him).

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