Earlier quoted context omitted.
exactly! if you're taking home the same salary whether you're creating massive value for the company, why bother?
Self-respect?
Respect is a two way street.
Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
481–490 of 505 posts
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies literally collude to keep salaries down. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
Yes, many (not all) companies are morally and ethically compromised to varying degrees. The law should attempt to reduce these harms where possible. I don't think this significantly affects what I wrote above.
The link addresses the "If they know you can't get more elsewhere" portion of what you posted, but I didn't respond substantially to the rest. Thanks for the chance to expand.
> "at risk of harm due to a possible societal backlash"
Fear of backlash over paying too little should not be a motivation for compensation. Trying to push it as low as you can without actually sparking dissent, internally or externally, is a cruel game.
I'm into the idea of worker co-ops, so I'm not starting from an assumption that the purpose of a business is to maximize profits for shareholders. Sure, the business might profit less if it pays its employees more, to me a business IS its employees, not a separate entity. If the employees create even more value for the company as a whole, paying them more is a cause for celebration.
If the amount of value you provide increases in a meaningful way, so should your compensation. Instead, on salary we provide unpaid overtime in times of need and enjoy a flat-line of compensation even if we create a new product, invention, or process that massively increases company value.
Bonuses, equity compensation, etc can and are gamed by companies to pay as little as possible without "fear of backlash," like you said. (Cliffs, golden handcuffs, dilution, preferred shares, etc).
Theoretically a salary should be desirable because it de-risks the downside: what if you're put on an under-performing team, or your product launch flops? NBD, because you're on salary, right?
Likely you'll just be fired anyway - you can be fired anytime without cause (in CA anyhow, since we're at-will).
So, salaried positions result in what the OP I was replying to said - "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".
That DOES seem logical to me. And undesirable. We want people to dial their effort up, right? How do we build compensation and hiring systems that reward people who can add value? As it stands we're leaving a lot of human potential untapped - by design!
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me sum up how I saw it go... -you can get more done if you avoid addictive black holes for attention --if they don't want you playing around they should pay you more than the salary you agreed to work for ---yup, still getting paid the same. company is getting theirs, go get yours (I think this reply was actually sarcastic) ----how do you live with yourself -----if you have integrity you're dumb ------most people…
If you think checking reddit or HN at work is a cardinal sin, be my guest and run yourself to the ground doing 80 hours a week with no respite, ignoring that many many studies place peak cognitive performance at 4 hours a day at best,be a "10x" engineer and get promoted.Unless you are laid off, but that rarely happens so dont worry.
This! We average at most 4 hours of concentration a day if we're not interrupted too much. More than that every day of the week leads to burnout. Not worth it even for big bucks because it's your health down the line. $ hours of good brain time is a good deal for the company. The rest is administrative stuff and whatever.
I think all of us end on HN/Reddit (and which is the biggest time drain to me) is to learn stuff. It's not a bad craving to be honest but it is a bit of a black hole. I did turn the noprocrast on at times to get away from it.
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#484Heck, writing this post is enough to be at least a 1.1x dev. I don't subscribe to the whole "x developer" thing, but this is an amazing list
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes sense as a default because it will be the correct choice 99% of the time. Even when no-SQL is the better option it tends to be a better option for only part of the application. Picking it as the default would make us wrong less often.
I question whether it's the "correct choice 99% of the time" or if, anecdotally, you're making the same kind of application and using technology you're comfortable with rather than considering alternatives.
> you're making the same kind of application and using technology you're comfortable with
To an extent yes, most apps (the ones that need a database anyway) are data oriented at their core, just a combination if input, storage and display. The data gets input here, it goes into rows, it gets displayed mixed with other data and displayed to someone else over there. Even when the specifics differ the data generally follows the same sorts of patterns because data is naturally relational and the combination of tables/rows/joins works really well nearly all the time.
> rather than considering alternatives.
The thing is, when you consider alternative you also have to consider the huge risks of what you don't know about them too. I've worked on one product where no-SQL seemed like the right choice, it was document oriented rather than the usual data oriented and it worked really well in our proof of concept. Problem is that the more we fleshed things out the more and more normal relational data we had and no-sql was making things more and more difficult and we started wishing we'd just stored the documents as a blob in an sql database.
So no, it's not just because I'm comfortable with it (although going with what you know has it's own merits), it really is the superior solution most of the time.
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can't you tweak and prune your resume to look younger? I'm 49 and still 2X ing. Had my 10x moments and think it depends more on the project, company and people for producing at that level.
What's "2xing"?
Doing work better and faster than most of my peers, but certainly not at ten times their work rates.
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " 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,…
To me, sounds as if he is an 1x dev at Amazon and a 2x elsewhere, outside A., not 10x though.
What about forgetting about these X and instead do what seems like fun on the spare time :-)
Friends, family, side projects / books if you want to -- but then because you want to? Life is short
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#488Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did not delete your comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23045720 ). I'll try to come back and reply to your posts in this thread later.
that's on me, looks like it was below the fold and is still there for now. but you're likely about to send it to the bottom for being off-topic, like you did last month. i've posted the same thing for 3 or so months in a row and there haven't been any changes. it's not even like you have to do anything other than say, "Please include some of this info".
That's part of the problem. It's not ok to keep repeating the same comment on HN.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
My issue is not "with engineers being able to compare processes between companies", it's with you (or any user) hijacking the job board with meta opinions about how the job board should be organized. Meta discussion all too easily takes over a thread and is particularly off topic in Who Is Hiring, which is a specialized context and not the usual open discussion. There's plenty of opportunity for freewheeling discussion elsewhere on the site.
Lots of people have strong opinions about how the hiring threads should work, because people have strong feelings about hiring in general. The job board itself is not a good place to argue about those; it's off topic, adds noise and makes it less useful for its purpose. If one user is allowed to do it, many others will certainly follow, so this isn't just about one comment.
I explained to you last month under what circumstances we'd consider making the kind of changes you're asking for; I also explained why that sort of meta comment is off topic and not allowed in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755576). To show up the next month and do the same thing again starts to not be cool; please don't do that any more.
Re: Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course, but it could be the other way around: doing your best work as a consequence of self-respect, not the cause.
What are you on about? Here's the post I replied to below, it said nothing about self-respect. You're the one who brought that up and still haven't explained how compensation factors into your "best work" / "self-respect" chain. Please, do share. ------------- > 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, o…
I was replying to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23034090, which was a comment by someone else.
On HN, please omit rude swipes like "What are you on about?", "Please, do share," and "So if someone X, you think they should Y, and nobody should complain because 'Z'? Wild." Even if you're talking to a mod, you still need to follow the rules. I also need to, and you and anyone else are welcome to point it out when I slip.