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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#361

Post by marcus_holmes »

jseban wrote: post #231
Kalium wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a harsh lesson about this in one of my very first jobs. A senior engineer on my team had built a rather complicated system. He was accordingly intimately familiar with all aspects of it. So when he estimated something on that system, it came with nearly all the discovery work already done. The PM proceeded to take an estimate from this person, hand it to a brand new hire, and expect them to deliver on that. Nee…

Yeah why do people have this view on programmers I just don't understand, every other single effing job in the world requires training and ramp-up, except programmers? And the fact that programming is depending on a unique pre-existing really complex code base further speaks against this. When my product owner quit, the new guy was working in parallel for 2 months to learn the ropes, noboby bats an eye, but a program…

We're just the nerds who push the nerd-buttons. We don't need to understand how it works, or why it should be this way not that way, or what the margins are. Just push the nerd-buttons and the damn thing work like it does in my head! All the hard work has been done by the ideas people who had to do all the creative stuff and make all the hard decisions. Now it just needs to be put into the computer-thingies and work!

/s, obviously

Re: Individuals Matter

#362

Post by ncmncm »

wittycardio wrote: post #326
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,…

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

If you thought this was about lines of code, you were not paying attention.

Re: Individuals Matter

#363

Post by ncmncm »

ahtihn wrote: post #194
ncmncm wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who told me about this was the person who counted up the code at the end of the project. And, yes, it was 250 from each, not 500 from each parent company. (Memory is funny that way.) I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer. As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two week…

That's a ridiculously wasteful way of managing work. I too can be a 10000000x engineer if I never let others actually merge their code and just write it myself instead.

It was a way that delivered product on deadline, for exactly that project. Every project has specific needs. If you code to some other project's needs, you do the wrong thing.

Re: Individuals Matter

#364

Post by hinkley »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #215
hinkley wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've experienced at companies on a death spiral is that there are a few people everyone can agree are useless, and beyond that you start picking people based on your poor understanding of how the sausage is actually made. Once someone really useful has been let go, you have the sudden realization that your situation isn't that different than theirs. If management can misunderstand Tim's value, they sure as hell…

Yeah been there, and instaquit. That company seems to be a shell now.

This experience contributed greatly to How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Severance Check.

Re: Individuals Matter

#365

Post by Jetrel »

Jensson wrote: post #129
topkai22 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it's beyond that. I know a dev that is the most brilliant ux dev I've ever met. He can create beautiful, dynamic, understandable UIs literally 20x than I can. However, he is just medeicore at must other tasks- constructing a common data model, scaling the backend or analyzing the data be is slower than I am, if he engages at all. More recently I told my manager that I was intimated by how effective one of my cow…

That was my point, arguments such as yours are just arguing with strawmen. 10x is compared to another professional in the same domain. Saying that the engineer isn't as effective at another domain as a professional of that other domain is arguing with a strawman.

It's not really a strawman considering it's EXACTLY what most companies are trying to do: make programmers fungible across domains. Critically; they're doing this because they typically have no visibility into these skillsets from the managerial level, and they typically only have one or two programmers "in a given domain" on a team - even in a very, very large company. The company would like to pretend these people are fungible, and can be interchangeably swapped out, but the reality is they have no immediately replacements on the team.

There's no sense in doing an apples-to-apples comparison when you've only got one apple, an orange, and a pear.

Re: Individuals Matter

#366

Post by jart »

jseban wrote: post #231
Kalium wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a harsh lesson about this in one of my very first jobs. A senior engineer on my team had built a rather complicated system. He was accordingly intimately familiar with all aspects of it. So when he estimated something on that system, it came with nearly all the discovery work already done. The PM proceeded to take an estimate from this person, hand it to a brand new hire, and expect them to deliver on that. Nee…

Yeah why do people have this view on programmers I just don't understand, every other single effing job in the world requires training and ramp-up, except programmers? And the fact that programming is depending on a unique pre-existing really complex code base further speaks against this. When my product owner quit, the new guy was working in parallel for 2 months to learn the ropes, noboby bats an eye, but a program…

If you wrote a novel and wanted your friend to write the final chapter, then would you need to train them in your novel beforehand? Not that much different from programming.

Re: Individuals Matter

#367

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #199
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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#368

Post by rStar »

nkoren wrote: post #280
rStar wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> observations about collectives can be usefully applied to individuals. > You might be right 80% of the time or, as in my example of a collective of oxycontin users, you might be able to predict certain of their actions at a 99% efficiency rate, and that may enable you to make statements that apply to the collective as a whole, and as individuals.

Yep, you're exhibiting precisely that kind of bias. I've known a variety of addicts and there's absolutely no statement one could make about them with 99% certainty that it will apply to a given individual. I don't mean that one should be naive about things. You might correctly observe that a high percentage of Oxycontin addicts exhibit behaviour X, and therefor you might want to keep a wary eye out for that behaviou…

> I don't mean that one should be naive about things.

i think that’s the literal disagreement we are having

> I've known a variety of addicts

how bout they try to get more oxy by any means necessary? i think i’m safe. i also think that some people really like to believe the line you’re selling, but that’s all it is. want and belief. some call it faith. whatever you want to call it, it’s wrong.

Re: Individuals Matter

#369

Post by [deleted] »

rStar wrote: post #368
nkoren wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you're exhibiting precisely that kind of bias. I've known a variety of addicts and there's absolutely no statement one could make about them with 99% certainty that it will apply to a given individual. I don't mean that one should be naive about things. You might correctly observe that a high percentage of Oxycontin addicts exhibit behaviour X, and therefor you might want to keep a wary eye out for that behaviou…

> I don't mean that one should be naive about things. i think that’s the literal disagreement we are having > I've known a variety of addicts how bout they try to get more oxy by any means necessary? i think i’m safe. i also think that some people really like to believe the line you’re selling, but that’s all it is. want and belief. some call it faith. whatever you want to call it, it’s wrong.

[deleted]

Re: Individuals Matter

#370

Post by rStar »

rStar wrote: post #368
nkoren wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you're exhibiting precisely that kind of bias. I've known a variety of addicts and there's absolutely no statement one could make about them with 99% certainty that it will apply to a given individual. I don't mean that one should be naive about things. You might correctly observe that a high percentage of Oxycontin addicts exhibit behaviour X, and therefor you might want to keep a wary eye out for that behaviou…

> I don't mean that one should be naive about things. i think that’s the literal disagreement we are having > I've known a variety of addicts how bout they try to get more oxy by any means necessary? i think i’m safe. i also think that some people really like to believe the line you’re selling, but that’s all it is. want and belief. some call it faith. whatever you want to call it, it’s wrong.

i have to say though, i do appreciate the well thought out, reasoned and mannerly post. you are very good at arguing your position, so, even though we ultimately disagree, much respect
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