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“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#341

Post by p_v_doom »

noosphr wrote: post #51
jaggederest wrote: post #5

I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…

Software is different. All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space. Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had of a supposedly peripheral fo…

I do agree that you can hide a lot of shit in code. But I think something often overlooked is that code is simply text, and we have general rules on how to write good text. Code is in the end of the day basically applied philosophy and expression of ideas.

If you do not have the experience and skill to express your ideas in text in a clear and concise, you will struggle to write good code (and vice versa tbf).And coders generally are lacking on the more humanities side of their educations.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#342

Post by interludead »

noisy_boy wrote: post #197
0xB31B1B wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comforting yet false assertions. Great engineers tire of working with “normal” engineers, they want to work with others who they respect. A team of only great engineers can have a completely different culture than a team of “normal engineers”. Teams of great engineers are magnets that attract others. Building a great team weirdly does not become harder over time, as your project is derisked you get access to larger a…

Every team doesn't need to have "great" engineers; I don't want "clever" solutions to my bog standard business application, just people to write sane, clean and maintainable code.

A great engineer isn't the one writing the most "brilliant" code; it's the one who understands the problem, picks the simplest solution that works, and makes life easier for the next person who touches it.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#344

Post by interludead »

ljm wrote: post #246

Fuck this constant dehumanisation and categorisation of the working class. The key to a great team is great leadership. Most people are terrible leaders, and they think that what they are worth is what makes them leadership material, even though they didn’t earn that worth themselves and didn’t put in a hard graft. The key to a great team is a fucking team. Only then can there be a leader. Let’s talk about ‘normal’ C…

Yep, you're absolutely right that leadership is often the real bottleneck in building great teams

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#345

Post by wiseowise »

jaggederest wrote: post #5

I like this article particularly because I think the trope that there's something unique and different about software engineering is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people looking to employ people in the field. These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the r…

If it’s so easy and not unique, how come engineers with supposedly 7-10 years of experience, that I work with, write absolute braindead code that breaks if you sneeze at it?

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#346

Post by llmthrow103 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #65

When did IEEE become host to clickbait nonsense? This whole take feels like an editorial by a junior engineer going off vibes. It's all off-base, from the misunderstanding of how to measure productivity, to what output matters, to the idea that there is such a thing as a "normal" software engineer. It's kind of embarrassing.

Yeah, it's really a poor quality post, but these terrible arguments and affirmed my bias toward believing 10x engineers exist and there are many great reasons to want to continue hiring them.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#347

Post by DanielHB »

ozim wrote: post #329
lovich wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor. Didn't we pass the rubicon on that in the early 2010s? I personally don't feel that its "like" finance but that its the exact same behaviors from the exact same set of people. Once tech stopped being a bunch of nerds in a basement and started being a source of wealth and power, it…

Oh stop narrating like nerds in a basement are cuddly lovable bunch. Amount of toxic behavior in nerdy groups is just as high as finance. Every single one just thinks how smart he is and how to one up the other. Technical interviews were always bad even before 2010 as there was loads of gatekeeping anyway.

Remember programming language quizzes? I kinda miss those, if you are testing for knowledge they have more value than leetcode

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#348

Post by gtsop »

ljm wrote: post #246

Fuck this constant dehumanisation and categorisation of the working class. The key to a great team is great leadership. Most people are terrible leaders, and they think that what they are worth is what makes them leadership material, even though they didn’t earn that worth themselves and didn’t put in a hard graft. The key to a great team is a fucking team. Only then can there be a leader. Let’s talk about ‘normal’ C…

I agree with your intent to introduce the angle of leadership and in particular the CEOs since it is well established that people can't properly evolve and thrive under a leadership that is rotten.

Having said that, there is also something to be said about engineers who consistently cave into management pressure not because of brute force management tactics, but because the engineers themselves haven't spent the effort to build confidence into good engineering practices that will allow them to both fend off pressure and deliver better work. I see people complaining: "oh the company we work for does this, that, the other, irrational things". Yes this is true, but what are you doing about it.

Do you expect higher ups, detached from reality and practice, to drive your working processes in a rational manner? This can only be the exception and we all know it. There are exceptions that proove the rule

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#349

Post by alecco »

alecco wrote: post #327
gatinsama wrote: post #323

There are no "normal" engineers. There are many terrible developers who can't fizzbuzz, a bunch of decent programmers, and a few software engineers who understand what they are doing. And then... the 100xers like Linus. It's pyramid-shaped. If the author is referring to people who understand what they are doing as "normal" engineers, granted, you can make a great team out of these... but how do you find many of them…

Agree. The required abilities multiply rather than add so the right tail extends much further than a normal distribution. The gap between median and top performers is extremely large.

Please read that the right way. Deliberate practice compounds exponentially. Those extra hours refactoring, contributing to OSS, or mastering systems design create 10x impact through learned architectural intuition that median devs never develop. Your new skills will go a long way.

Re: “Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

#350

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B »

Muromec wrote: post #45
ultra-boss wrote: post #2

"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week." plus plus plus plus plus to this.

I want to believe, but has anymore ever worked at such great organization?

I have twice, but it's always huge companies ($billions and 100k employees) who has an established business, and some kind of monopoly which could not threaten the survival of the company.
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