581–590 of 745 posts
The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly. You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job. So let…
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Your quote of the article made me think I was going to hate the advice, but then I realized you quoted it out of context, here's the full quote: > People might claim they have “signals” for these things… “if they ask about time off in the first interview then they are never going to be there!” But these are all bullshit. If you’re using signals like these you’re just guessing and turning away good candidates
That’s a pretty huge distinction. Can’t believe he misrepresented the author like that.
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If the company thinks they have a good story around PTO they will sell it in the first interview. As an interviewee it's very important to me and I will definitely ask questions, but later in the process when I have more leverage. I don't think someone asking in the first interview is lazy, just perhaps naive. They'd be better to ask about work/life balance and expectations in general and then probe what the intervie…
Correct. It is in the interest of the company to sell you on all the perks and they should do that up front. It is in your interest to view PTO as any other form of compensation and to make those compensation demands after you have demonstrated how valuable you are to the company via the interview process. You don't start negotiating salaries before the first interview, because that's a bad strategy.
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I think you’re missing the point or I was unclear. The point is not that masters at a skill don't exist. The point is that attributing their skill mostly to something innate rather than practice, study, etc is not supported by the body of research they review in the book (the book is written for a general audience, their academic research supports the arguments in the book).
There is a mountain of evidence to the contrary. No matter how much you or I would practice, study, etc. we would never become as good as tourist. Most people reach their plateau in competitive coding within 1 year. For example, here's my Codeforces profile: https://codeforces.com/profile/baobab Started in 2015, plateau'd in 2016 and no measurable improvement from subsequent 3 years of practice and study.
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I really like the policy of "minimum mandatory time off" some companies have. That makes a big statement about where their priorities are in terms of care for their employees' well-being.
The company I'm at effectively has that as part of their unlimited PTO policy, though the timing is company-mandated, being the first week of August and the week between Christmas and New Years, which is a week so many people are likely to take off anyways, it just makes things easier to make everyone take it off. Going into the week off in August, I wasn't sure how seriously they took it, but sure enough, I didn't g…
One of the things I have noticed lately is that people who change jobs often have completely different perception of the industry as compared to people who don't change that often. Both of the strategies have pros and cons. For instance people who change jobs quite often don't seem to care alot about the business per say they seem to emphasis on the technology more as compared to people who stick to one org. However,…
If you’ve been at the same place 5-10 years you have seen only a few rodeos, as it were. Their speculations on how things will play out are based largely on hope, not experience.
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I really like the policy of "minimum mandatory time off" some companies have. That makes a big statement about where their priorities are in terms of care for their employees' well-being.
Banks tend to have this policy because there are a lot of ways to steel in ways that you can cover your tracks. But most of those ways require regular effort to cover your tracks, so if you are locked out of the office for at least two weeks someone is likely to notice. Note that this is two continuous business weeks. Nothing happens over Christmas so that doesn't count.
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Sure, I don't know if they were "born" smarter. At least one of these people, I got to witness up-close his methodological approach to all his coding work. I don't know if the rest had a specific technique or not. All I know: these guys were all insanely fast, and only very rarely made any coding errors.
I agree with you there. There are certainly much faster, much more dedicated workers. My irritation is with: 1. All the hero worship 2. This idea that they are unreachably superior to everyone else
Unreachably superior? Well, I'll never be as good as these guys I'm thinking of, and probably not even if I doubled down on sharpening my craft. There's lots of factors for that. Maybe they picked up better habits early, maybe I need to drop dumb hobbies. Or maybe, they're just clearer thinkers. Who knows, but I'm OK with it.
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Correct. It is in the interest of the company to sell you on all the perks and they should do that up front. It is in your interest to view PTO as any other form of compensation and to make those compensation demands after you have demonstrated how valuable you are to the company via the interview process. You don't start negotiating salaries before the first interview, because that's a bad strategy.
How often do people really negotiate PTO? I have been flatly refused the times I have asked about it. It seems to be much more difficult than negotiating salary or other comp. Companies handle those individually so they are used to negotiating on them. PTO is often handled at a departmental or company level and companies can be hesitant to make exceptions for an individual employee.
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>, I would say that 10x programmers do exist. Yes but I think the underlying issue is that some people really Really don't like to acknowledge (or are unaware) there's a small set of elite programmers that can do things average coders can't. But any label we use to describe them (i.e. "10x", "rockstar", "ninja", etc) will be psychologically distasteful. I previously commented about that effect: - https://news.ycombin…
We don't call Vermeer a 10x painter, Beethoven a 10x composer, nor Shakespeare a 10x author. It would be silly to call Turing a 10x computer scientist, or rockstar and ninja would be insulting. Vermeer, Beethoven and Shakespeare are masters of their crafts. The same word we use for skilled tradesmen. Why can't we call them master programmers?