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Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

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Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#401

Post by TrackerFF »

cyrialize wrote: post #103

I've been a developer for about 3 years now. This is probably my own fault, but I feel pressured to be constantly doing something towards programming. I feel like I should either be reading a book or starting a project. I have 10+ programming books where I just finished reading one of them and I have way more unfinished projects than I could count. It's reassuring to see the push-back against the 10x developer idea,…

As long as you're not a -Nx programmer (or at least Nx where N >= 1), you're good.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#402

Post by hamburga »

OOPMan wrote: post #393

"Rule 5: When to use Python or Ruby Python and Ruby seem to me to be pretty similar in that they’re scripting languages and dynamically typed and seemed like the greatest thing in the 00’s. You use them when speed is more important than legibility or debugging. And then Python for ML/AI applications." Eh? Speed? What kind of speed? Developer speed? Code speed? Why is legibility in Python/Ruby bad? Bad compared to wha…

OP here. I know that these rules of thumb gloss over some of the details, and it's this kind of ruthless criticism that I wanted to invite with posting this :)

I'm coming from the perspective of a tech giant, where there are thousands (tens of thousands) of services, and it's often a huge challenge to trace the flow of data through any given system or API and pin down the cause of production issues.

The static typing with Java gives us a lot more guarantees about the data flowing through systems, compared to Python. If I want to inspect some code or debug a production issue, static typing gives me a lot of guardrails. I can be sure that data coming in is of a particular shape, that null constraints are met, etc. Whereas (from what I can tell) it takes a lot of extra work (and more possibility of missing something) to do the same with Python or Ruby. But I haven't ever built a Python or Node service or whatever.

That's what I meant by legibility and debugging speed.

If you define legibility as "can understand the purpose of the code," I do think that Python can be way more legible since you've got so much less boilerplate.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#403

Post by nomel »

war1025 wrote: post #309
imron wrote: post #164

Rules of Thumb for a 1x Developer During work hours stay away from: * HN * Facebook * Twitter * Reddit * Any other thing constantly distracting you and taking away your attention from your job Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer.

> Congratulations, you are now 3-10x developer. Congratulations. You are still getting paid the same. Boosts in productivity need to come with boosts in pay, otherwise the logical thing to do is to scale back your effort to a point where the amount you get done matches the amount you get paid for.

I’ve never heard of a company that will offer to pay you more if you promise to be more productive in the future. What industry are you in?

All of my raises and promotions came from results that exceeded expectations.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#404

Post by mm89 »

karakanb wrote: post #144
kumarvvr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small question. Is PHP still a preferred platform for any sort of complex web development? I have never even looked at the php site or docs, but I am curious. In this day and age, is there a subset of Apps that PHP is suited for?

The hatred against PHP seems to be coming from the people that only know the old days of the language and haven't checked it recently. I'd say PHP is quite relevant for any kind of web-apps these days; the language has evolved greatly in many fields, you have a huge community and there are tons of libraries to get anything done. Especially with Laravel, you can get a fully-functioning web application with a full auth…

Python is great, but I think the answer to "develop a web app as quickly as possible" is just going to be whatever the developer has been using and is comfortable with.

A .NET developer might be able to throw up a webapp quicker with .NET tooling instead of picking up Python & Django (or PHP & Laravel), for example.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#405

Post by cyrialize »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #264
cyrialize wrote: post #103

I've been a developer for about 3 years now. This is probably my own fault, but I feel pressured to be constantly doing something towards programming. I feel like I should either be reading a book or starting a project. I have 10+ programming books where I just finished reading one of them and I have way more unfinished projects than I could count. It's reassuring to see the push-back against the 10x developer idea,…

> " It's reassuring to see the push-back against the 10x developer idea, I'm starting to feel less guilty now when I spend my free time NOT on programming. " 10x developers don't spend their free time programming, at least in my observation. They don't need to. > " I want to ask though - the author works at Amazon and considers himself a 1x developer. " A 1x developer would be an average (ok, fine, median) developer,…

> 10x developers don't spend their free time programming, at least in my observation. They don't need to.

Ah, I guess I need to read more about what people view as a 10x developer. I didn't mean to imply that a 10x developer spent all of their free time coding. I just meant that with companies, job descriptions, other dev, etc. talking about wanting a 10x developer I feel pressured to spend my free time programming, or at least doing something that would make me feel like I'm a worthy candidate.

> A 1x developer would be an average (ok, fine, median) developer, no? About half are better and about half are worse. Compared to the bottom half of the statistical distribution, a 1x developer would by definition perform better.

That makes sense. I guess what I'm trying to understand is, could you call yourself a 1x developer (or average) when working at a FAANG company? Doesn't working at a FAANG company imply that you are better than average, considering the status of these companies, their rigorous interview processes, and so on? I get the impression that FAANG only hires 10x developers, or at least developers that come across as 10x.

I apologize if I'm coming across argumentatively at all. I'm just trying to understand if the author is actually a 1x developer, or if they're a 1x developer at Amazon. Would a 1x developer at Amazon be a 10x developer elsewhere?

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#406

Post by sufyanadam »

> Rule 20: When somebody says Agile, push for Kanban, not Scrum... ...Scrum can easily mean that you’ll get pressured to work extra hours to complete something within that arbitary two-week horizon.

This is very true. I've worked for over 12 years in the bay area in different software engineering teams at startups and found that scrum just leads to burnout and developer unhappiness and encourages team members to just do the minimum 'slap it together till it works' solution without thinking long-term on codebase stability, architecture and maintainability. By far the best development process that leads to high developer happiness, engagement, productivity and empowers them to go the extra mile to go above and beyond, and produce work that acts as a force-multiplier across the team, is what the author describes here as 'Kanban', also known as eXtreme programming. Most people from Pivotal Labs or Carbon Five or from a startup that adopted their process would recognize what the author describes as 'Kanban'.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#407

Post by TimTheTinker »

bearjaws wrote: post #11

I hate the notion of "10x developer". It focuses on hiring the best person, rather than firing individuals who undermine the team. The reality is, there are some 1x developers, and some .5x developers. Even worse though are the -1x developers. So many times I see a corporate culture of firing = bad, so lets just try to find someone who is a "10x", when really all you need is to remove the people who cause more work f…

In my experience, the most productive teams are a mix of people with widely differing skills combined with good relationships, good communication, and a lot of mutual respect.

I worked alongside a true 10x (or maybe even 100x) developer on my last job. It was astounding to watch his code changes on the order of 500-4000 lines (mostly front-end JS/TS/HTML/CSS) roll in day after day after day for years -- most of that being new code that implemented planned features and worked. He wasn't really a systems thinker, and he wasn't super big on abstraction, either. But we had 2 other developers who were extremely good at refactoring, abstracting, systems thinking, etc., as well as 4 rank-and-file devs who got their work done. We all filled in where others lacked, and it was an incredibly effective team.

My point is, "10x developers" do not exist in a vacuum, and hiring people strictly for past productivity in a particular environment is fallacious. Instead, try to craft a "10x team" where each person brings something helpful to the table, everyone works hard because they want to, and there is an environment of supportiveness and great communication.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#408

Post by evilduck »

kumarvvr wrote: post #63
deweller wrote: post #44

> PHP is banned at Amazon due to security reasons, but its successor, Hack, runs a lot of.. Just to be clear, Hack is not PHP's successor. Hack is a fork of PHP developed by Facebook. Hack will not overtake PHP any time soon. PHP has had security issues in the past. Sure you can do stupid things with it if you want, but modern PHP is security conscious out of the box. Frameworks like Laravel make great default choice…

A small question. Is PHP still a preferred platform for any sort of complex web development? I have never even looked at the php site or docs, but I am curious. In this day and age, is there a subset of Apps that PHP is suited for?

Short answer is no, there's nothing PHP is really suited for anymore where it's a clear and decisive winner in my opinion (which you're free to ignore, but I think I have a pretty reasonable opinion having worked on a team that uses PHP for current API work).

For web backend response handling PHP is perfectly _capable_, but there are lots of alternatives that are capable. That's a pretty low bar nowadays and shouldn't be a deciding factor by itself. If you're in a situation with an existing investment in PHP and with a team of productive people already capable and willing to work with PHP, it's not an outrageous decision to keep using PHP. PHP 7 and beyond brought a lot of things that makes the language pragmatic and performant. If you can pretend PHP was invented whole cloth as PHP 7 in like 2016 and completely ignore any and all content related to it that's more than 3 years old, it's generally ok to work with now. If there's a PHP-based COTS product you merely need to install, configure and run then that's also fine.

But... if you're planning on creating a high quality modern PHP codebase correctly with full type hinting, unit and integration tests, robust CI pipelines, making design decisions that maintain code quality long term, etc, etc, you're not really gaining anything by choosing PHP either and might actually be losing out on something else outside the realm of backend web request serving that might have come easier if you had invested your time elsewhere. I find it hard to play devil's advocate for PHP beyond making generalized statements that could apply to Ruby or Javascript as well.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#409

Post by ornornor »

spicymaki wrote: post #123
noad wrote: post #21

I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. Then I hit 30. That type of talk stopped. Then I hit 40. Now I will not be considered for any entry level, mid level, or senior level software dev job anywhere in the United States, despite being very desperate and willing to relocate for anything. Doesn't matter. Too old. I'm suppose…

>I used to get called a 10x developer, I was also called a rockstar and a ninja and a 100x dev and every other compliment that was hip. The 10x developer talk is just hype by unscrupulous employers to entice young engineers to have an unhealthy work life balance. Of course they don't tell that to older developers because they would call you on their bullshit. I know a lot of professional developers that are in their…

> see NJ needs COBOL developers

NJ wants UNPAID cobol developers. I’ve been researching the cobol market in the last few weeks to see if it was worthwhile and people in the know pretty much agreed that it’s absolutely not worth it. Doesn’t pay well, codebases that run it are hell to work on, and it’s all outsourced to sweatshops in Asia anyway.

Not contesting your more general point per se, but cobol is not a good example of that.

Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer

#410

Post by hamburga »

maps7 wrote: post #58

I'm not sure how I should be reading the article so maybe it's going over my head. > Rule 10: When to make a microservice > I would use a microservice when I have a relatively small and simple chunk of code that needs to run every once in a while. Isn't this wrong? There's no reason a microservice should just run once in a while. It also creates a lot of complexity for a simple chunk of code.

OP here: yeah, that is wrong. I meant to say serverless, like AWS lambda. Fairly embarrassing. I just updated the blog.
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