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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

#491

Post by whstl »

Izkata wrote: post #430
whstl wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really sure? If 1x is the absolute rock-bottom lowest possible productivity, are them really the precious angels who care deeply about the user while making amazing code? This is even more absurd.

> If 1x is the absolute rock-bottom lowest possible productivity You understand the original meaning of the term. This is not how most people use it nowadays.

No, I don’t. You’re reading too much into my post. I haven’t made any judgement of whether 1x means average or rock bottom, because it doesn’t matter.

The assertion made by GP is absurd regardless of the definition, period.

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

#492

Post by jes5199 »

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…

my rule of thumb is that the average startup has no more than one novel piece of code, and it is usually one of the first things written. Then after that there’s enough plumbing and UI work to keep a few hundred regular engineers busy

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

#493

Post by stopyellingatme »

0xB31B1B wrote: post #117

I could not disagree more with nearly everything in this article. Individuals ship software not teams, unless you are pair programming. Nearly all complex technical projects are owned by one super smart person (Ex: linux). You don't need to have a scientific measurement of productivity to know that in your median team of 12 there really are 2 people carrying the water for everyone else. A players hire A players, B pl…

While you may need an individual or two to carry things, you will also need other little things to get done that would slow down the "super stars". It's a team effort, always (when you get outside of personal projects).

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

#494

Post by whstl »

fzeroracer wrote: post #95
incrudible wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine taking pride in your craft rather than doing only the bare minimum to pad your ego, what a crazy approach!

Taking pride in your craft would mean having enough self-respect to both not burn your soul out for the sake of a corporation that wants to make you redundant and using it in a direction that directly benefits you. I've been in the industry long enough now to see those 10x engineers having pride in their work get their mindset shattered because John from financials thinks they can juice the next quarter by laying the…

Why, though?

Lots of people are happy to just do whatever, go home and not work on personal projects. Plenty of people here defend it.

Why should productive engineers change their habits just not to be called a sucker?

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

#495

Post by soulofmischief »

TZubiri wrote: post #470
soulofmischief wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

You're confusing confidence and arrogance. Confidence can be misplaced, or maybe hard-won through experience. But arrogance never has a place in a team. If you go around thinking you're 10x better than your peers, you're massively selling yourself short and I can bet you the rest of the engineers do not feel the same way about you.

> Pointing out how the other is worse and they are better is argumentative, which usually a 10x anything doesn't need

I'll be honest, this post is a bit incomprehensible. You say a good engineer has to be arrogant, then go on to claim how such an attitude can be combative. Pick one argument, not two conflicting arguments.

You sound young. I understand that youth can sometimes lead to the kind of arrogant thinking in your comments, but real wisdom will start coming whenever you realize how this kind of thinking looks to others, stop making comparisons, and try to learn from everyone on your team.

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

#496

Post by logsr »

hinkley wrote: post #481
logsr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Focus is a super power this is crucial. from my own productivity I know that I can function at 1X or 10X depending on my focus. being a great engineer requires practice most of all, and the consistency of focus during that practice will impact its value. in my experience, engineering is all about efficiency, and as i have developed over time the scope of factors i take into account when calculating the efficiency o…

> engineering is all about efficiency See, that’s a problem. Engineering is all about effectiveness. Not efficiency. Focus is great for slamming out a bunch of code that everybody else hates and has to tiptoe around you about because focus also made you so goddamned proud of your monster. Slow down and check the signposts before following your good intentions all the way to the end.

effectiveness, professionally, is creating value for your clients and employers. the ratio of value to cost is how efficient you are as an engineer. it is all efficiency.

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

#497

Post by jimbokun »

strangattractor wrote: post #448
jimbokun wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

Just because he's brilliant at writing green field code to solve problems like this one, doesn't imply he's incapable of producing production code when required.

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

#498

Post by breadwinner »

x86x87 wrote: post #435
breadwinner wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of hard problems that are unrelated to scientific research where you need more than just "normal" engineers. Look at the number of failed projects at big companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, they failed because "normal" engineers couldn't pull it off.

hah. i'm sorry but this is extremely naive. projects don't succeed of fail solely on the technical chops of the engineers. it's a whole "ecosystem" that has to work and most projects I've seen failing are due to politics/bikeshedding at upper management level.

Your experience is different from mine. I have worked at big tech companies and have seen too many projects fail due to lack of technical chops. Do they fail for other reasons too? Sure, such as not finding product-market fit, but at some companies they start with guaranteed product-market fit because they are copying a competitor!

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

#499

Post by breadwinner »

paxys wrote: post #436
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…

How many companies out there genuinely need an Ilya Sutskever to achieve their goals? Everything in this article is accurate for the 99.9% of companies and teams that aren't working at the bleeding edge of the industry. The mythical "10x engineer" is always a net negative on teams building a boring CRUD app. You always want a handful of "normal" engineers instead.

> The mythical "10x engineer" is always a net negative on teams building a boring CRUD app.

No disagreement there at all. "Normal engineers" are all you need for "normal software" such as CRUD apps.

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

#500

Post by ike2792 »

I find that the true "10x" engineers are staff-level engineers that a) have strong technical ability and b) are really good at communicating and mentoring. They are 10x because they are able to make all of the "normal" engineers around them better and thus level up the productivity of the entire team. Engineers like this are worth their weight in gold and far more valuable than the infamous "brilliant jerks" who can easily design an excessively complex system by themselves that magically only they are able to maintain effectively.
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