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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

#441

Post by godot »

I do agree with this article; I just think there is a time and place for each type of engineer.

There are companies where 10x engineers make sense, and there are companies where normal engineers are better to have.

One good example is the Commandos, Infantry and Police article from 2004 Coding Horror. (you can look it up, not going to link) Typically the commandos are the 10x engineers. Having them on early in a startup is tremendously helpful. As a company grows to stages where you want infantry and police, having commandos / 10x engineers might hurt more than they help. Of course this isn't always true but this is more likely true than not, in most cases.

We as humans, and particularly in America, like to quantize people and use a single variable to rate how good people are. In reality different people are good at different situations. It's not always the best option to hire for the 10x engineers.

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

#442

Post by datadrivenangel »

bigtunacan wrote: post #279
callc wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone who loves software: software is not special. Every discipline has infinite depth. Railways in 2D may seem simple but there the simplicity may be intentional. Just like when you write software that runs things like planes, trains, or medical devices, all of a sudden you’re writing in C, without recursion, without function pointers, without using the heap, etc. Look at the concord airplane. A mess…

Not op, but I'm clearly reading their message differently than you. Any type of physical engineering is based on hard facts, data, and well established historical research, mathematics, and more. I've seen many an electrical engineer say, "fuck it, this is too hard and pays too little" and so they pivoted into software engineering quite easily. On the other hand I've never seen the opposite. Real engineering is hard…

There's software engineering work and then there's programming.

90% of programming is enterprise CRUD, and the bar is low. Likewise, 90% of electrical work is basic circuitry with off the shelf parts: does it work and not catch fire. There are electrical engineers doing Real :TM: Engineering, but 90% or more of the work is electrician work.

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

#443

Post by flavio81 »

TZubiri wrote: post #198

Engineering work, like many other branches of intellectual work, does not have many of the properties of other jobs. So I don't share the ideal of a normal engineer doing normal work in their office hours. I also don't buy into the 10x pushback, there's not only 10x engineers, there's 100x engs. Easy to prove, can you think of an engineer that adds negative value? That deletes tests, or breaks stuff? That adds left-p…

>Easy to prove, can you think of an engineer that adds negative value?

Yes, i have many examples. Two of them I personally fired. One of them, I should have fired much early. I let this engineer basically add negative value by trying to make his peers (other engineers) finish the work it was delegated to him, thus creating negative value by preventing the other, highly productive engineers, to do their tasks.

I warned him not to do this, but he didn't heed. Sadly due to Human Resources the firing process took way too long. I should've acted earlier.

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

#444

Post by DrScientist »

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 software is by far the most complex things humans have created and much of that complexity is hidden.

Case in point - more than one Mars mission has failed due to software errors.

However you could argue that the best way to deal with that complexity is not to have a brilliant mind that can grok more of that complex space, but by simply taking good engineering practices to minimise and manage it - ultimately the complexity is beyond us all if not managed.

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

#445

Post by datadrivenangel »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #116
sroussey wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The methodology is unconstrained as another way to put it. Which, indeed, is different from engineering where constraints are non-negotiable, and thus the methodology as well. I think a lot of people doing functional programming, as an example, enjoy the constraints and the discipline that it imbues on their craft.

> engineering where constraints are non-negotiable except that's not really true. The big difference is that to negotiating the constraints when it comes to (physical) engineering, one of the biggest factors is money (and lots of it). "Well, we could double the span but for that you'll need to have parts A1, D5 and T3 built out of ..." Software development isn't free, but it doesn't typically incur doubling of costs…

I do a lot of data engineering work, and people are horrified to learn how much costs increase as you go from daily/hourly batch jobs to real time or near real time streaming. Seems like a tweak but it does sometimes incur massive cost increases.

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

#446

Post by antonvs »

grandempire wrote: post #253
throwaway2037 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is so weird on so many levels. I'll focus on this part: > You can also trace personal backgrounds and you'll see a much higher representation in the newer cohort coming from upper middle class backgrounds with families in careers like finance, consulting, medicine/dentistry whereas more in the older cohort came from more modest middle class backgrounds in engineering, academia, or even working class trades.…

That’s why the bill gates story got so much public attention. It’s surprising. Their Harvard kid is doing what?

I suppose it may have been surprising to anyone completely out of touch with what was happening at the time.

I'm only a little younger than Gates, and it seemed like, what else would you do? PCs were revolutionizing the world.

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

#447

Post by antonvs »

lovich wrote: post #270
rsanek wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Once tech [...] started being a source of wealth and power this happened "in the early 2010s"? I don't think so. Software engineers have no power, and in comparison to finance, quite limited wealth.

Despite where they are now, the FAANG founders could sling some amount of code back in the day. I have no doubt they would fail their current interview cycle for engineers if they tried it under a pseudonym, they were considered software engineers when they started their companies and that cohort is now in charge of a double digit percentage of the planets wealth. If you think software engineers have no power and lim…

> software engineers have no power

Like that fellow who runs a car company now

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

#448

Post by strangattractor »

jimbokun wrote: post #215
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…

> I would work all night. This is not a 10X programmer. A 10X programmer delivers the same amount of functionality in 1/10 the time. For me the first 10x programmer that comes to mind is Peter Norvig. This spell checker he wrote in a single flight remains a work of art: https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html Very few programmers would come up with something so concise and elegant yet powerful in such a short amount of…

Yes - Dr Norvig is exactly the type of expert I would often engage to figure out difficult problems. Ask him how to configure a Nomad cluster and he would likely say "What is a Nomad cluster do?"

Writing and debugging production code is a different skill set. Finding the optimal algorithm is useful but not the same as releasing it into the wild which may require maintaining backwards compatibility, work arounds for bugs in other code or hardware bugs that can no longer be fixed at the foundry - the list goes on.

The vast majority of work programmers do 10X or otherwise is not greenfield where you get to pick the programming language you have 10K hours of experience using, the best hardware or an unlimited budget of money and time.

Now I would consider Dr Norvig a 10X educator. That program demonstrates how a decent knowledge of algorithms and math can take a relatively complex problem and make it tractable.

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

#449

Post by dilyevsky »

breadwinner wrote: post #406

The flaw in this article is the assumption that 10x engineers are just more productive, and several "normal engineers" can do the work of a 10x engineer. This may be true if you're building "normal software". But for certain kinds of software development, a team of "normal engineers" can't do what a single 10x engineer can do. For example, how many "normal engineers" would you need to replace an Ilya Sutskever? The a…

The key sentence in article imo:

> We place too much emphasis on individual agency and characteristics, and not enough on the systems that shape us and inform our behaviors.

This is just author trying to impose their personal politics on their org. Popular sentiment among pmc unfortunately especially in the last 10 years of zirp

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

#450

Post by psunavy03 »

cafard wrote: post #423
golergka wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of 10 richest people of the world, 8 have background in software engineering. Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Ellison, Gates, Page, Brin, Ballmer. Only Buffet and Arnault are exceptions.

Ballmer has a background in working for a software company. Did he ever actually work in software as such?

Pretty sure he was explicitly brought on by Gates and Allen because he was a non-technical MBA type, and Microsoft had grown to the point where they needed one of those.

Sort of tracks with the Welchian bullshit he seems to have supported as CEO.

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