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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

#461

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

antonvs wrote: post #447
lovich wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't think he's any good at programming

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

#463

Post by adityaathalye »

Well I honestly think "10x" Engineers exist... even 10,000x ones.

It's about creating leverage.

So, the great ones aren't lone mercurial artists.

They are the ones who are, in fact, very good at the craft. AND they also got good at writing things down for self/other, and teaching other people what they know, and creating a culture of enthusiastic open-minded curiosity, whether on an IRC channel or in a packed fancy conference auditorium.

Once-in-a-generation brilliance is optional. The rest is not.

e.g. Brian Kernighan will be the first one to tell you that Ken Thompson was in a league of his own compared to Brian. But Brian himself is a 10,000x programmer. How much leverage have his book(s) and software and generous public education created in the world?

Anyone can become a 10x version of themselves (next-year you is radically better than today-you) if they think about that and learn to be like Brian (think, do, self-teach, other-teach, spread infectious enthusiasm).

Edit: clarify prose, and fix embarassing name snafu

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

#464

Post by datadrivenangel »

alecco wrote: post #327
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…

Agree. The required abilities multiply rather than add so the right tail extends much further than a normal distribution. The gap between median and top performers is extremely large.

The 10x programmer is based on research cited in the Mythical Man Month, and there the most productive programmer was 10 times more productive than the least productive, as far as time taken to complete a coding task. The most productive were ~3x faster than the mean/median programmer.

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

#465

Post by magicalist »

throw1111221 wrote: post #421
magicalist wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious Eh, you can also create a bijection between all programs and the natural numbers, so I don't think this analogy gives much insight. It's also silly to think that structural engineers or whatever only have to worry about where to place indistinguishable cubes in 3d space at a single moment in time an…

I personally though it was a very interesting analogy. Let's take a made up example of a structural engineer designing a building. As another comment mentioned, in theory the design space here is enormous. Just the concrete mix can be endlessly optimized. But here there's a large monetary cost tradeoff that's obvious to everyone involved. Say an overenthusiastic junior proposes attempting to rediscover ancient Roman…

> However, when designing real world things, economics rapidly culls the design tree

Exactly like sticking with blub, which was only chosen because of historical accident, but they're stuck with it because it would cost too much to stop all progress while refactoring everything to work around it.

You're arguing a matter of degree while asserting a matter of kind.

And the point is still ridiculous with the explicit comparison to maths, which is somehow different because there exists wrong proofs.

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

#466

Post by chatmasta »

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…

Intelligence is the easy part. That’s not what makes a 10x engineer. The 10x comes from consistency, persistence, creativity, resourcefulness, patience, focus, communication, drive, empathy, and a bunch of other traits that are rarely found all together in a single individual.

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

#468

Post by handwarmers »

alienthrowaway wrote: post #457
handwarmers wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is, can we find counterexamples to your model of reality in actual reality. And if we can easily do that, what does your apparent over-confidence about your statement say about you? E.g. https://bellard.org/ To add to the insult, I'd challenge you to think of how many "great teams" of "normal" engineers, whatever any of these terms means, could pull off most of these projects in any amount of time. G…

Fabrice Bellard is not a counterexample you think he is. He is brilliant, but he doesn't stick around the projects he starts off. Someone has to triage bugs, setup CI, tag releases, keep the website running and all the other boring stuff. I have contributed to one of the projects he originally authored, and my mundane contributions along with other volunteers not as brilliant as him have ensured the continued success…

My main frustration with the person I was responding to is that a lot of the terms we are arguing about are ill-defined, and yet he's arguing them with a lot of vigor.

There is also a time dimension to software. I have been on some occasions the only developer of pieces software that were tackling hairy problems that teams of "normal" developers would avoid. I always wanted to solve those problems in a way that would make everyone's life easier. To do that I had to spend a ton of deep focus time on modeling the problems effectively, and if I was successful, people who were put off by the problem space would come and contribute, because they found the model amenable. Or they thought it'd benefit them to be a part of a project that's picking up steam. A lot of these people would fix small issues here and there, but some of them actually donated a lot of focus and helped take these projects to new levels. The ones making the deep changes always cared deeply about the problem space, or brought a lot of knowledge from another subset of cs, and I wouldn't call them "normal". I think it is a disservice to the sacrifices they made to do what nobody else felt like doing and throw a blanket statement like "teams of mundane contributors do the really important work".

This is not a dig at "normal" devs - I have been the "normal" dev on many projects, but because of my experiences I try to give credit where credit is due.

I also detest the 10x thing exactly for the reasons you pointed out.

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

#469

Post by nateglims »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #415
alphazard wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is spot on. I would add that it's not only 1 super smart person, or only 2 people per team, it's a power law. 1 person does the most, a few people do almost as much, then you start getting out into the tail of "normal" people. You can try to hard partition the tail and create an 80/20 rule, but it's fundamentally continuous, and the shape parameter will be different for each organization. Understanding t…

Spot on. The productivity gradient is extremely steep, and calling this out has become impolite.

IME people who say this in the workplace tend to overestimate the importance of one aspect (usually the product development itself) and ignore the importance of things like taking a product to manufacturing, getting technical costing under control, or adapting to user needs. There's a lot of fluff in the article, but this part in the conclusion and your statements about "A people hiring A people" or the example of Linus' place in the kernel all align:

> It’s a competitive advantage to build an environment where people can be hired for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses; where the emphasis is on composing teams

There's plenty of otherwise "10x" programmers who go outside of their strengths and suffer for it.

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

#470

Post by TZubiri »

soulofmischief wrote: post #220
TZubiri wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It sounds like you don't have an appreciation for software complexity. What starts off as a simple write() call balloons into a complex system as it evolves to meet your needs. Only then will we know if a great developer was behind the wheels, by how easy it is for the next person in job of maintaining and extending the system to fuck something up due to a lack of context and experience. Another sign of a real 10x en…

Yeah, the warzone will be the final judge, no doubt, this is just cheap talk.

> a real 10x engineer is an even temperament and a lack of arrogance

Super subjective, but I see the 10x engineer as being arrogant, you have got to if you are really 10 times above your peers. Although it's true that some arrogance might come from a place of insecurity. Someone who is truly leagues above someone else will not berate them for being below, they will encourage them to improve or palliate them. Pointing out how the other is worse and they are better is argumentative, which usually a 10x anything doesn't need.

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