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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#321

Post by Dudeman112 »

varjag wrote: post #306
Dudeman112 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd wager that has something to do with jumping the shark.

People feel the need to chat about 10x developers when they don't even agree what a 1x developer is, and when they do present a definition, that definition is a function of (company, team, project, existing code base) which means there are more possible instances of 1x developers than the amount of developers who have ever lived.

Everyone is better off if they just ditch the "10x" which has connotations that programming nerds will latch on to and just use "highly performant dudes".

Re: Individuals Matter

#322

Post by polskibus »

kortilla wrote: post #292
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.

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.

I deliberately used “closer to 1x”, but let me respond with an anecdote. I know several people, each working in a different org, who explicitly manage their managers by demanding to work on issues that have good visibility, are not too short >2 weeks but not too long <2-3 months so they are ready before the next review period. This way they are seen from the outside as very good performers while someone else is doing the less appreciated (but still essential) work.

Re: Individuals Matter

#323

Post by pm90 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #220
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A senior at FAANG is worth sometimes well north of 500K/yr. There are plenty of folks strewn about small software companies that do similar work to a senior or even staff/principal at a faang at wildly huge discounts. Those discounts are why it's easier to poach the employees. If a company has 10 engineers earning $200K/year, why would you buy the company for $667K per person and then pay the employees on top of th…

There are only so many $500k spots available. If every engineer in the world said “I’m moving to SF and applying to Google” and assuming visa allowed that you’d see Google paying a lot less for talent! Which means that while some people earning 200k are underpaid, they can’t all be underpaid.

Big Tech and most established companies make billions in profits off software products developed by engineers. Engineering Software Products is a highly specialized skill and absolutely isn’t compensated to the same degree as its impact; Silicon Valley was the first to realize and reward this somewhat adequately (IMO still not enough).

It’s really great for management types that they’ve managed to restrict the median compensation at fairly low levels; this is also the case for software outside of the well known tech hubs.

Re: Individuals Matter

#324

Post by a_square_peg »

gadrev wrote: post #299

> 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 larg…

We are interchangeable - everyone is. The president of the United States is interchangeable. The CEO is interchangeable. Is this really that difficult to accept?

Re: Individuals Matter

#325

Post by pm90 »

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…

Developers wouldn’t skip a boat every 2 years if they were happy. Instead of accepting that as a fact to be worked around try to understand why your developers are leaving after a 2 year tenure.

I’ve worked at a few companies, all of them have had highly skilled senior engineers with long tenures. The “2 year tenure” is a self fulfilling prophecy that management types love as a way to treat engineers poorly (why bother? They’re gonna leave anyways!).

Re: Individuals Matter

#326

Post by wittycardio »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88
ncmncm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

> I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail,…

You don't measure code by the number of lines written, you measure it by amount of productive value. Early engineers at Google were easily 500x ( keep adding more zeros if you want ) more valuable to google than a random swe today

Re: Individuals Matter

#327

Post by [deleted] »

moralestapia wrote: post #159
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail,…

By measuring productivity on lines of code written you show just how inexperienced and naive are. Are you HR, by chance? Have you ever coded something in your life?

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#328

Post by notpachet »

jiggawatts wrote: post #227
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…

I just went through this, like... today. "Tell me what date task X will occur on." -- where task 'X' takes 5 minutes, but has a long list of pre-requisites that take 1-4 weeks each, sequentially , of which 100% our out of our control. ... That's not planning , that's fortune-telling . You may as well ask an Ouija board. Planning is making sure the the pre -requisites happen before you attempt to start the things that…

Like the parent poster said, people are on a bell curve. It sounds like you may only have been exposed to mediocre, passable, or plain bad PM's so far in your career.

So I'll remind you: the reason we pay PM's is because good PM's can, and do, exist. I've only worked with a few great PM's, but they outshone their competition with just as much brilliance as the 10x among us engineers outshine the 1x. It's ironic that you would reduce PM's to a single heterogeneous caricature in reply to an article that is essentially saying that it's harmful to do so.

Re: Individuals Matter

#329

Post by mattm »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #274
rramadass wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally irrelevant and no Ad Hominem please. FYI, D.L.Parnas and Barry Boehm defined the field of Software Engineering. Almost all Govt./DoD standards are based on their research and writings.

TIL: "Winston W. Royce's final model, his intended improvement upon his initial "waterfall model", illustrated that feedback could (should, and often would) lead from code testing to design (as testing of code uncovered flaws in the design) and from design back to requirements specification (as design problems may necessitate the removal of conflicting or otherwise unsatisfiable / undesignable requirements)" https://…

This is a good article on the topic http://www.bawiki.com/wiki/Waterfall.html

Re: Individuals Matter

#330

Post by silexia »

polskibus wrote: post #322
kortilla wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I deliberately used “closer to 1x”, but let me respond with an anecdote. I know several people, each working in a different org, who explicitly manage their managers by demanding to work on issues that have good visibility, are not too short >2 weeks but not too long <2-3 months so they are ready before the next review period. This way they are seen from the outside as very good performers while someone else is doing…

I built and own a company with 200x employees building a wide variety of websites for people.

The 10x programmer is real. The 5x salesperson is real. The 20x manager is real.

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