The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer • Hacker News Board

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#41

Post by yelnatz » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 12:24 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #4

He's empirically wrong because I've worked with 10x developers. A few years ago I worked with a guy there whose output, productivity, and smart solutions combined with godlike C++ coding ability made him probably 100x more effective than anyone else in the place. This was in the front office at Goldman Sachs, so the rest of us weren't completely useless. He was just in a different league though. I have also worked wi…

I've worked with someone like this during my internship at IBM.

He was an intern like me but he was carrying the whole team. Solving problems, implementing features left and right.

Never really did talk to the team, other than meetings, just did his work and locked himself in his cubicle.

During our internship he studied for and took a couple of scjp and c++ certifications just because he was bored not studying for exams.

I miss that guy. Not that sociable but really really fucking efficient as a developer.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#42

Post by yummyfajitas » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 12:25 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #39

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is a straight-up straw man. It's an exaggeration (I probably should have been more clear), not a straw man. Obviously big corporations have different levels of engineers, but many of them claim engineers top out at a certain point. Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x…

> Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this Those claims are debatable and often true, not always true. As opposed to straw men which aren't even debatable. I've seen less actual 10* engineers and more high-functioning individualistic coders who maintain whole systems on their own, and at some point leave the company (most people change jobs at some point, but in their case it was accom…

Is it your belief that no "high-functioning individualistic coder who maintain[s] [a] whole system on their own" can also produce a maintainable system? If one can, that's your 10x coder right there.

I'm getting the impression that you believe 10x coders exist but merely dislike them.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#43

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 12:28 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #42

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this Those claims are debatable and often true, not always true. As opposed to straw men which aren't even debatable. I've seen less actual 10* engineers and more high-functioning individualistic coders who maintain whole systems on their own, and at some point leave the company (most people change jobs at some point, but in their case it was accom…

Is it your belief that no "high-functioning individualistic coder who maintain[s] [a] whole system on their own" can also produce a maintainable system? If one can, that's your 10x coder right there. I'm getting the impression that you believe 10x coders exist but merely dislike them.

By "high-functioning" I meant "good enough to be recognised as above average, but not 10 * good". My point about maintainability is that long-term benefit can be a lot less than it looks in the short term, when "individualistic" people who "know they're very good" are involved.

> If one can, that's your 10x coder right there

It can happen, it's just not likely enough to stake your business on. What I dislike is the cult of rockstar programmers. If there are 100 job ads for rockstars, are there really 500 actual rockstars showing up for those interviews? No. All this cult is doing is encouraging harmful egoism.

It's all in the first few lines of the article:

> Myth of the Rockstar Programmer: Calling out rockstars demotivates the team. Telling someone they are a rockstar may cause them to actually believe it

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#44

Post by bjornsing » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 1:16 PM UTC

Isn't it obvious that the myth or reality of the 10x engineer has a lot to do with what the engineer is supposed to do?

Say that the engineer has to independently develop the general theory of relativity to solve a problem, then I'd say Einstein would have been about Inf times more productive than the average engineer at solving that particular problem.

If on the other hand it's the usual "migrate this crap code from that crap platform to this shiny new golden one" kind of work, then you'd have more of a bottleneck in how fast you can push the buttons on the keyboard...

You can't talk about productivity without defining the task, and software engineering is a field with extraordinary span in the difficulty of tasks.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#45

Post by frostmatthew » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 1:29 PM UTC

Each time something like this is posted to HN many are quick to come to the defense of the 10x engineer as not a myth. Since so many HNers are founders/CEOs/CTOs/whatever I wonder how many of them making comments that 10x engineers are "responsible for most of team's output" are actually paying their "rockstar" engineers ten times average.

The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians.

Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!)

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#46

Post by dexen » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 1:52 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #39

yummyfajitas wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are debatable and IMHO are often true, but "No programmer is worth more than any other", i.e. "all programmers have exactly the same worth" is a straight-up straw man. It's an exaggeration (I probably should have been more clear), not a straw man. Obviously big corporations have different levels of engineers, but many of them claim engineers top out at a certain point. Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x…

> Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this Those claims are debatable and often true, not always true. As opposed to straw men which aren't even debatable. I've seen less actual 10* engineers and more high-functioning individualistic coders who maintain whole systems on their own, and at some point leave the company (most people change jobs at some point, but in their case it was accom…

You have somehow re-defined software engineer performance as a mere function of company bottom-line, and ended up measuring performance of individual software developers by proxy of long-term company performance. There are two problems with it.

First, not all software engineers actually do commercially work on commercial software -- as a quick example, Con Kolivas, who is an anaesthesiologist by day and kernel hacker in spare time. Others may work on commerical software by themselves, without any external team or management involved; think Colin Percival. I would even wager a guess that some of the best software was created in a non-commercial way, say, Linux kernel -- at least the early versions of it.

Second, the impact any software engineer has on company bottom line is much affected by other aspects of a company. In a symbolic notation, you could say:

  BOTTOMLINE_IMPACT := RISK_MANAGEMENT(SALES(TEAM_MANAGEMENT(THE_SOFTWARE_DEVELOPER(EXISTING_CODEBASE)))).

Invoking the Amdahl's law -- even if you had a 10x SOFTWARE_DEVELOPER, performance of the whole system will be limited by the other factors. In my limited experience, the RISK_MANAGEMENT (of software development and use) part is the least understood one those days.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#47

Post by bostik » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 2:02 PM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #35

wesnerm2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're mistaken about the laws of probability. The normal distribution arises from sums of the same distribution. This is most frequently found in sample averages, which is . More accurately, sample averages follow a student T distribution, which converges to a normal distribution as sample size increases to infinity. In general, humans do not follow a bell curve for complex traits. For instance, it's common to see b…

Not only that, he seems to be conflating standard deviations with productivity multipliers (I'm not exactly sure how to translate his +2 to productivity, I could be misinterpreting), which is definitely wrong.

Heavens, no. That wasn't the idea, and certainly not my intention. It was merely a numerical standard deviance value, nothing more.

Granted, the people at the high end of the scale are probably more productive when facing more difficult problems but that's all. "How much more" is then an altogether different question. I'm not sure if one could even put a figure on it.

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#48

Post by d23 » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 2:09 PM UTC

> Reality is a normal distribution curve. Lots of good average senior developers, some amazing outliers and some junior folks with potential. (and some folks that suck.)

Strange, but this doesn't seem to be the case for me, or at least the people that I've had to interview and work with. I've run into far too many developers who have no business installing apache much less making anything of use for a client.

I don't consider myself a "rockstar," but when you put me next to one of these folks my productivity is going to be 10-fold better at least. On top of that, the things I build will be reliable and maintainable -- their will be a mess of technical debt that breaks every few days.

As a sidenote, I find this obnoxious:

> I hate Quora so I won't link to them, but here's a modification of a great answer from Nate Waddoups that was taken from some internal engineering paperwork:

"I hate Quora, so I'll just steal their content and post it here."

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#49

Post by dexen » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 2:10 PM UTC

frostmatthew wrote: post #45

Each time something like this is posted to HN many are quick to come to the defense of the 10x engineer as not a myth. Since so many HNers are founders/CEOs/CTOs/whatever I wonder how many of them making comments that 10x engineers are "responsible for most of team's output" are actually paying their "rockstar" engineers ten times average. The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of…

> The best baseball players make much more than the average player, the star of a Hollywood film makes far more than most actors, and true "rockstars" make a heck of a lot more money than the vast majority of musicians.

It's sales and risk management problem. Given a rockstar and an aspiring novice rocker, you can sell concert tickets at 10x (or 100x) price mark when the former plays. The costs of infrastructure are high, but scale roughly with O(log(n)) which means econonmy of scale, and being rockstar means automatic, `free' marketing. It works a little bit different in the software world.

If you sell to corporate customers, it's sales and risk management (support, compatibility, etc.) problem. You need those costly sales reps. Due to risk management, corporation pay only slightly more for 10x better if it is built by small team -- they want a large, established vendor (risk management on their part). Which obviously pre-cludes all-star team. Unless you hit an acquisition jackpot :^)

If you sell software packages to consumers, it's marketing and margins problem -- there is always a middleman taking a cut; think Apple Store. Unless you become viral -- like Angry Birds did.

If you sell services to consumers, it's again marketing and scaling problem -- you'll end up needing huge backend, which means large team, which agains precludes an all-star team.

> Anyone know any companies that pay their best engineers multi-million dollar salaries? (if so please let me know where to apply!) GOOG, FB, etc. -- to the founders ;-)

Re: The Myth of the Rockstar Programmer

#50

Post by SideburnsOfDoom » Sun, Sep 29, 2013, 2:35 PM UTC

dexen wrote: post #46

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your claim that "no programmer is worth 10x the average" does imply this Those claims are debatable and often true, not always true. As opposed to straw men which aren't even debatable. I've seen less actual 10* engineers and more high-functioning individualistic coders who maintain whole systems on their own, and at some point leave the company (most people change jobs at some point, but in their case it was accom…

You have somehow re-defined software engineer performance as a mere function of company bottom-line, and ended up measuring performance of individual software developers by proxy of long-term company performance. There are two problems with it. First, not all software engineers actually do commercially work on commercial software -- as a quick example, Con Kolivas, who is an anaesthesiologist by day and kernel hacker…

> You have somehow re-defined software engineer performance as a mere function of company bottom-line,

Absolutely.

While everything you say is true, building the right thing is as important as building the thing right. If you are working for a company, and what you do doesn't benefit that company, you might as well go home.