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Individuals Matter

danluu.com

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Re: Individuals Matter

#301

Post by jseban »

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.

The best teams I've ever worked with, that were the most productive and also had the best team work and team spirit, was when we assigned tasks in planning. And gave the tasks to whoever was most suitable to work on it.

Unfortunately we were never allowed to do that, because of Scrum, and were only able to do it on the low down for a short time until management cracked down on it and enforced "anyone who happens to be free works on whatever is on top of the backlog".

Re: Individuals Matter

#302

Post by zshrdlu »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #296

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…

What do you consider to be crap?

Re: Individuals Matter

#303

Post by ZephyrBlu »

bobm_kite9 wrote: post #228
noduerme wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly, though, most critical moments in history have been shaped by (highly error-prone, but non-fungible) individuals, acting on their own.

The law of large number works well for some things (say, shoe sizes) and fails to work for others (e.g. income distributions, which follow a power-law). So it's not odd at all that it would fail to adequately account for people. It's just sad we don't have anything better. Can't we find something better?

Power laws apply to individual output as well: https://dariusforoux.com/prices-law/

Re: Individuals Matter

#304

Post by teddyh »

3grdlurker wrote: post #258
teddyh wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you’re gonna go around the office to point fingers and tell on people that they’re not 10xers, and then call them too sensitive if they react? You’re talking in abstracts but if you put what you said in context (ie this discussion) it doesn’t make sense.

> So you’re gonna go around the office […]

This discussion is not about me, nor did anyone advocate that behavior. You are making up scenarios in your mind about what other people in this thread are thinking and saying, but these things are all imaginary on your part.

Re: Individuals Matter

#305

Post by varjag »

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.

No, some people are a lot more productive across broad range of tasks. Often they are assigned tougher/critical stuff though because it doesn't make sense them do trivial tweaks.

Re: Individuals Matter

#306

Post by varjag »

Dudeman112 wrote: post #265
kragen wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are statistical outliers in every single thing that has a big enough amount of samples and that it is possible for there to be statistical outliers. Maybe you attract those like flies are attracted to honey, but pointing out that an Einstein existed isn't really helpful for approximately all teams of physicists out there, minus one or two teams I'm not even saying there isn't a huge quality variance in the regu…

The proverbial '10x developer' is by definition an outlier tho yet people never stop arguing they don't exist.

Re: Individuals Matter

#307

Post by [deleted] »

xvilka wrote: post #264
eitland wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think, it's my own idea but you never can be 100% sure, some kind of uncertainty always persist.

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#308

Post by crispyambulance »

PeterisP wrote: post #276
crispyambulance wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people also don't realize that high-performers weren't always high-performers. They had to hone their skills, usually by doing years of the right kind of challenging work with modest rewards, and sometimes they can be formed by exceptional mentoring. But however they got there it took time, it's something that can be cultivated as long as folks aren't treated as fungible.

I disagree, the few really high-performers that I have worked with were high-performers already from the first week with a new technology, from the first month in their first job, and already as a student during practical work they were more productive than most people who had many years of challenging work behind them. Experience is important and adds up, honing the skills makes everyone better, but it's orthogonal…

I guess it depends on how one defines 10x or "high performer". Prodigies and maestro's will always be few and far in-between, is that what is meant by 10x? I don't know. But given the relative abundance of 10x'ers anecdotes in discussions in places like HN, I always just take that term to mean "really good" or perhaps just fuzzy romanticizing-- and not literally able to do the work of 10x "mortals".

Re: Individuals Matter

#309

Post by Veelox »

Just as a random aside, I don't know why but Dan is putting out some great articles at an absurd rate late. I really appreciate it. Keep it up Dan!

Re: Individuals Matter

#310

Post by slingnow »

kragen wrote: post #201
mostertoaster wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I bet an in progress airplane that weighs a 1000lbs is further along than an airplane that weighs 1.

Not if they have the same wingspan; the "1000lbs" airplane is 0% done because it will never fly.

What were you trying to say? You realize a Boeing 747 weighs over 400,000 lbs. And a tiny Cessna 172 weighs ~1500 lbs.

If the planes have the same wingspan, it's likely they're in the same class, and weight is a perfectly reasonable measurement of completion percentage.

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