Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Super-star programmers

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 124 posts

Re: Super-star programmers

#61

Post by zohebv »

presidentender wrote: post #50

I can think of one real, actual, verifiable superstar: Steve Yegge. There are more, but I don't know who they are. Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got: "Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on…

Steve Yegge was also unable to successfully maintain a not-too-complex 2D game and managed to blame Java for it

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht...

10Xer imples 10X some base level. Depending on what base you choose, Yegge can easily fall short.

Re: Super-star programmers

#62

Post by presidentender »

zohebv wrote: post #61
presidentender wrote: post #50

I can think of one real, actual, verifiable superstar: Steve Yegge. There are more, but I don't know who they are. Taking his blogs at face value, and assuming that my sample size of 1 is enough, here's what I've got: "Superstars" get things done because they get things done. They may be ADD in their multitude of projects or in their personal lives, but while they're producing, they produce. They don't fuck around on…

Steve Yegge was also unable to successfully maintain a not-too-complex 2D game and managed to blame Java for it http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.ht... 10Xer imples 10X some base level. Depending on what base you choose, Yegge can easily fall short.

Oh holy shit. You have no idea.

I "worked" on Wyvern in high school (in that I played a lot of Wyvern and made a few terribly shitty game areas and ended up being an administrator, or "Wizard" in classical MUD parlance).

You know how Dwarf Fortress, that ASCII game, simulates a whole lot of ridiculous detail? Over-the-top, "the goblin's spear strikes the baby dwarf in the back upper left tooth and it really hurts so he cries for mommy"? Wyvern didn't quite have that, but the API implied most of the functionality for it.

You didn't have inventory slots, you had body parts, which brought with them the ability to wear or wield certain other items.

You could've written Wyvern in a much simpler fashion. A bright high schooler could make a game that had all of Wyvern's functionality at the end of its life. It's the mountain of "do a lot of other shit later" that got in the way.

And that's what he's writing about in that blog post - not that he's perfect and Java sucks, but that he was trying to employ industry best practices and make everything perfect without compromises. It's not very hackerish, and sure, it was stupid. But the guy wasn't doing this for his day job and didn't have defined deadlines. He was a programmer, in other words, not a project manager.

And that's where he fell down. Project management, not programming. And if you read back through his massive wall-of-text blog archives, you can see him mature as a programmer and project management.

(Please note that I am an avowed fanboi, if you didn't catch that already, and as such everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt.)

Re: Super-star programmers

#63

Post by mgkimsal »

excuse-me wrote: post #37
vbtemp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the article never used the word "super star", it's something I see around HN and the startup world quite a bit.... I sort of snicker when I see startups post jobs looking for "rock star" coders [1]. What self respecting person would call him or herself a "rock star", let alone apply for such a position? Maybe it's just a gimmick to get mediocre developers to get to work on boilerplate web work.. [1] I also s…

Next time you see someone ask for it - simply reply with your request for a $M salary. After all what does a rockstar get ?

Rock stars generally don't get a salary, but royalties or profit sharing. The better the star/band does, the more money they make right now at the gig, and longer term in increased sales over time.

If someone wanted me as a 'rock star' developer, I'd want some serious profit/revenue sharing plan in place - something more than "10% of profits are held back and divvied up amongst 90 other people based on seniority".

Re: Super-star programmers

#64

Post by to3m »

excuse-me wrote: post #37
vbtemp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although the article never used the word "super star", it's something I see around HN and the startup world quite a bit.... I sort of snicker when I see startups post jobs looking for "rock star" coders [1]. What self respecting person would call him or herself a "rock star", let alone apply for such a position? Maybe it's just a gimmick to get mediocre developers to get to work on boilerplate web work.. [1] I also s…

Next time you see someone ask for it - simply reply with your request for a $M salary. After all what does a rockstar get ?

I have to say, I was more hoping for the groupies and gak myself. A million-dollar salary from a programming role is so unrealistic.

Re: Super-star programmers

#65

Post by evilbit »

one aspect this "superstar"-worship drivel^Harticle seems to ignore is the organizational contribution to success.

i'd argue that individual contribution to any given project of substance is greatly overestimated, while contribution of the team (organization/culture/whatever) is unfairly underestimated.

even in professional sports, superstar a winning team does not make.

Re: Super-star programmers

#66

Post by zmj »

barrkel wrote: post #53
jdlshore wrote: post #29

I'm disappointed to see the 10x programmer meme hit a publication like the Economist. There's no scientific evidence of 10x differences in programmer productivity. To quote Laurent Bossavit [1], who's investigated the studies people like McConnell use: "How strong is the support conferred to the 10x claim by the best-reputed list of references, for a reader persistent enough to follow the chain of citations back to p…

I've seen developers who create, rather than reduce technical debt; who take longer to get familiar with codebases; have a hard time focusing in the presence of distractions; and who seem to have difficulty ramping up solution domain knowledge (i.e. programming / software engineering techniques). And all of these things seem to be down to individual ability or motivation, i.e. something about the person, rather than…

> I've seen developers who create, rather than reduce technical debt; who take longer to get familiar with codebases; have a hard time focusing in the presence of distractions; and who seem to have difficulty ramping up solution domain knowledge (i.e. programming / software engineering techniques). And all of these things seem to be down to individual ability or motivation, i.e. something about the person, rather than external factors.

I don't entirely disagree with you, but watch out for the Fundamental Attribution Error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Re: Super-star programmers

#67

Post by ajross »

marshallp wrote: post #57
ajross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm constantly fighting that same urge. The problem is one of domain. UI coding for straightforward data models (which is 90% of all "web" development) just ... isn't very hard or impressive. Great programmers in that regime produce software that is smaller, cleaner, tighter and higher quality. But it's still just a bug database or social thing or web store, etc... Anyone (even mediocre programmers) can look at it an…

The majority of amazing software that has not been created yet is "CRUD". Why developers keep thinking the low level stuff is the good stuff. A huge class of such systems that are waiting to be created are crowd labor systems. How do you create leaderless organizations that produce what google or boeing or walmart produces and that compensates individuals for performance. The answer today is a messy unorganized marke…

The answer, of course, is that the "good stuff" is subjective (and almost never aligned with "the biggest value opportunities", ick).

Yes, CRUD pays. Being able to make more CRUD in less time (and/or CRUD that is better performing or more maintainable, etc...) is a valuable skill.

But it's boring. And more, it's just not impressive in the same way that, say, qemu/kvm is (or Mesa, or Linux, or llvm, etc...) That stuff is hard, and fun, and interesting in a way that CRUD will never be. So it has value too, and IMHO it's entirely reasonable to celebrate its practitioners even if they don't make as much money as CRUD jockeys like Zuckerberg do.

Re: Super-star programmers

#69

Post by pradocchia »

btilly wrote: post #55
jdlshore wrote: post #29

I'm disappointed to see the 10x programmer meme hit a publication like the Economist. There's no scientific evidence of 10x differences in programmer productivity. To quote Laurent Bossavit [1], who's investigated the studies people like McConnell use: "How strong is the support conferred to the 10x claim by the best-reputed list of references, for a reader persistent enough to follow the chain of citations back to p…

One of the better sources for these differences and their magnitude is Peopleware . Instead of citing vague research "somewhere", they did their own primary research. More specifically they set up coding wars where different programmers at different companies assigned to the same task independently. They found 10x differences in time spent on the average coding war (which was typically a pretty small sample) with tho…

In Peopleware, they also observed that some programmers did not themselves appear to produce much, but their presence on a team made others more productive. They were not managers, they were not leads, they just helped the team work better together, in some fashion, "managing" out or across rather than up or down.

I will jump the shark and speculate that these gel-members tend to be female more often than male, and the gelling-like effect comes from how their presence and patterns of behavior influence the group dynamic. I will further speculate that the dearth of women in development incurs a hidden cost to productivity, since statistically, fewer teams will have women, and consequently, the incidence of gel-members will be lower, and teams more fragmented.

I think there is a business opportunity here somewhere, or maybe it has already been realized in places, but the players have not been eager to trumpet their results.

Re: Super-star programmers

#70

Post by randomdata »

larrys wrote: post #49
drharris wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed; and my post was never intended to belittle Joel himself. He has provided great value to the industry in both capacities. I'm mainly challenging the notion that if he truly hires only developers he considers to be rockstars, then why doesn't the company have a more compelling domain than bug tracking and PM?

Well that certainly has to do with both business sense as well as the risk taking ability and what he feels comfortable with. To do something compelling you have to want to take that risk (which could result in spectacular success or failure). Joel might not want to bite off more than he can chew or he simply might not be creative enough to come up with anything "more compelling domain than bug tracking and PM". That…

That is why a good programmer needs to be around good business people

Partnering with a business person for my next venture is something I'd like to try, but it's not exactly clear where you find a good business person who wants to partner up. The business people I am in contact with are already busy with their own things.

Unlike a programer who might be presently doing the 9-5 corporate job, it seems like a good business person will always be busy doing their own businesses, as that is what business people do.

I have been mulling over something in particular as of late, but I presently don't have much interest in building it if I'm also going to be responsible for selling it. A partner seems like it would be a good fit.

Post reply on HN