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“Normal” engineers are the key to great teams

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

#351

Post by eru »

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…

> These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field, finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for personal valor.

I'm not sure what you are talking about. Finance people regularly talk about risk adjusted returns, not raw returns.

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

#352

Post by eru »

asdff wrote: post #261
throwaway2037 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is weird, but typical of HN. Most of the off-balance-sheet shenanigans of pre-2008 world are gone. There is now a global regulator that covers all systemically important financial institutions, that also includes very large insurers. The world of financial engineering is much lower risk and higher transparency than pre-2008.

Must be why every company pays its fair share of taxes right?

What do you mean by 'fair'?

Different jurisdictions have different tax rates.

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

#353

Post by blitzar »

CrimsonRain wrote: post #56
strangattractor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once considered a 10X. I would work all night. Rewrite code simply because I found it objectionable - lots of things I'd never do now. Mostly after working those long hours I return after a long rest and spend most of my time fixing all the new and ridiculous problems I created while working tired. Things may have gotten done a little faster. Never once did it even matter - there was no material benefit to the…

So you 10x'd in wrong direction. Doesn't mean something else can't 10x in the right direction.

To management the two directions look the same. They probably held a ceremonially ritual where they fired the person who was dragging things back 1x in the right direction.

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

#354

Post by strken »

anon-3988 wrote: post #161

Do people really question the existence of "10x engineers". It follows from Pareto distribution that some people are just exceptionally productive. That doesn't mean that its good or beneficial (depending on what the scope is). That also doesn't mean that its good to only have them, because they often carry their own baggage.

I question the usefulness of that way of thinking. 10x isn't an unchanging skill level, it's comparative performance over a period of time, and that extremely high level of performance likely has many contributing factors. Saying "oh, John is a 10x engineer" stops you from exploring how John is doing ten times the work of his colleagues.

There are good answers, like John is an expert in the specific technology you're using and he was hired through a meet-up you sponsor; there are bad answers, like John has found a way to game the ticket system; and there are debatable answers, like John's team has a high support burden which he never helps with. If you insist on seeing him as a 10x developer through innate skill or divine fiat, then you're not going to look for the root cause of why he's doing more work than everyone else.

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

#355

Post by ginko »

lovich wrote: post #266
Aurornis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, the field grew tremendously and you can see a clear generational bias -- by years of experience, not age -- where the cohort from the last 10-15 years has a completely different understanding of what the craft is I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. I'm not that old, but I've been around long enough to hear people of ever…

> I bet a lot of people 10-15 years older than you would say the same thing - except they'd say it about you and your generation. And they’d probably be right! I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering some…

>I remember the grognards giving me shit about memory management and me giving it right back by explaining that what they considered a large chunk of memory would be worth pennys next year because of Moore’s law and I wasn’t going to waste time considering something that I literally couldn’t learn faster than it became obsolete knowledge.

And that's why all applications are laggy as shit these days.

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

#356

Post by khazhoux »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #117

I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B pl…

Your post is super offsensive. And true.

The number of times I've reviewed someone's code that's been "in progress" for 3 weeks, to see it's 200 lines of simple python code... ugh

"oh, but it was really actually complex and you just don't get it" --> Incorrect

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

#357

Post by remoquete »

wiseowise wrote: post #343

One more empty reaction epiphany rambling of another random-god-knows-who.

I'm seeing more reactions like this. I wonder if it's a consequence of reading AI generated drivel and not being able to tell content apart. Or perhaps people is asking for more action and less reaction. I don't know.

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

#358

Post by TrackerFF »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #117

I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B pl…

Have you ever worked on large projects? I'm talking about projects which involve hundreds of people, thousands even, and those that stretch over many years.

In the grand scheme of things, the 10x-100x engineers work gets attenuated - think of it as some kind of averaging filter.

Do you think some 10x engineer carried the moon landing? or the Large Hadron Collider?

Sure, if you work on some dinky team single-digit number of workers, the contribution from the 10x engineer will be more apparent - but as the number of people involved increases, the more important the average is.

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

#359

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

strangattractor wrote: post #22
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…

I was once considered a 10X. I would work all night. Rewrite code simply because I found it objectionable - lots of things I'd never do now. Mostly after working those long hours I return after a long rest and spend most of my time fixing all the new and ridiculous problems I created while working tired. Things may have gotten done a little faster. Never once did it even matter - there was no material benefit to the…

>I was once considered a 10X. I would work all night.

You are part of the toxic culture until you realized that was that it is overall counterproductive. Collectively we software developers are to blame and no one else.

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

#360

Post by gatinsama »

interludead wrote: post #339
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…

There's a huge middle ground between "can't FizzBuzz" and "100x Linus-level genius," and that middle is where most functioning engineering teams live

Yes, but it's way more on the can't fizzbuzz side. Our view is skewed because of the people we work with. If you have an extreme Pareto distribution, talking about "normal" is not helpful.
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