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Individuals Matter

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Re: Individuals Matter

#91

Post by philipswood »

3grdlurker wrote: post #66
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent. It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be…

I remember finding a site (a design patterns repository page of all things) that explained the nuance of different people having different expected outcomes on different domains well.

But despite searching for it for years I haven't been able to find it again - web searches tend to be bad at finding things that you found before, again.

Anyway, this was described as the "movie producer pattern" (maybe it was director)

I remember it going something like this:

As opposed to the factory worker pattern which describes people who perform simple tasks that are straightforward and are easy to learn and perform and are hence interchangeable, it is more accurate to use the movie producer pattern.

A producer will have shown his or her abilities in a specific set of movies, each with a certain style and genre, which will lend credence to their ability to perform similar work in a similar genres. It's clear however that the specific director will make a large impact to the final movie and will have a personal touch.

For engineers, Susan, who has spent the last decade honing her skills on language VM implementations is expected to be an all around star resource, but would probably be a more trustworthy choice for more VM work as opposed to implementing a graphics engine or database.

(In analogy to a director with a string of science fiction movies who might not be the best choice for a romantic comedy)

Re: Individuals Matter

#92

Post by philipswood »

csee wrote: post #16

Realizing this is important for retention. It's damaging when upper management falsely thinks people are interchangeble, which is a common view among non-technical types and HR. This leads to 10x people feeling underappreciated and resentful, ultimately causing them to resign for higher compensation and more appreciation elsewhere. It can literally destroy small companies if an individual's unique contribution isn't…

Gelled teams are an actual thing though.

A good team can be better at something than all it's seperate members.

Re: Individuals Matter

#93

Post by Jensson »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88
ncmncm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

> I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail,…

For any positive real number X and employed engineer A with positive productivity, I can find an employed engineer B where productivity of A is more than X times the productivity of B.

Proof: Pick B to be an engineer with productivity 0. 0 * X = 0 for all X. Productivity of A is defined to be positive, so is greater than 0. Hence productivity of A is greater than X times the productivity of B.

Re: Individuals Matter

#94

Post by MattGaiser »

Swizec wrote: post #29
paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

Even if there aren’t 10x engineers, there are still engineers with different levels of skill and knowledge in different areas.

One of the best engineers I ever worked with was terminated (he was a contractor) as he spent his career on the backend, was told he would work on the backend, and they assigned a complicated React feature to him over his objections that he had no knowledge of the framework or frontend dev in general.

Re: Individuals Matter

#95

Post by ncmncm »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #88
ncmncm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

> I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). So your 500X engineer knows a 5000X engineer and he wrote as much code as 999 other engineers combined? (That would make him a 999X engineer, FWIW) A 500X engineer (per your measurements) would have to write 500 lines of code every day without fail,…

The person who told me about this was the person who counted up the code at the end of the project. And, yes, it was 250 from each, not 500 from each parent company. (Memory is funny that way.)

I do not doubt that the numbers were rounded for simplicity. It is meaningless to talk about a 499x engineer.

As was explained to me, this engineer assigned two-week work units. If the work was not ready at the end of two weeks, he wrote it himself over the weekend. So, a fair bit of code was written that did not make it into the final product.

Re: Individuals Matter

#96

Post by sangnoir »

Swizec wrote: post #29
paxys wrote: post #5

"Who is going to do it?" is always my first question whenever I am asked to estimate a piece of work. PMs/EMs are usually taken aback by the response, as if we are all supposed to pretend that all dev "resources" are equal. Yet reality doesn't fit into neat planning spreadsheets or burndown graphs, so often gets ignored.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

Isn't the "10x" label contingent on engineers being functionally indistinguishably, except some are allegedly 10x more productive? Specialization is what I figure has highest impact on turnaround times in a team setting. Just because an engineer is the most familiar with a component/subsystem - which allows them to make changes to that subsystem faster, doesn't make them an all round 10x engineer.

Re: Individuals Matter

#97

Post by nverno »

nimithryn wrote: post #24
nimish wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some people seem to view companies like a game of SimCity, where if you want more money, you can turn a knob, increase taxes, and get more money, uniformly impacting the city. But companies are not a game of SimCity. If you want more attrition and turn a knob that cranks that up, you don't get additional attrition that's sampled uniformly at random. People, as a whole, cannot be treated as an abstraction where the a…

> This is why you never, ever take anyone seriously who thinks of society like a model. I’ve never understood these critiques. If you want to study society, what’s the alternative? No matter what, you have to make a model of some kind. Yeah, some models are simplistic, but maybe they can capture the high order bits of the phenomenon they are modeling, and at least you are committing to an idea you can codify, find fa…

> some models are simplistic

Every model is simplistic, otherwise it's not a model, but reality. Societal models (I've never heard of a remotely reasonable one, aside from psychohistory) have the unique problem where they influence the people they are supposed to model. If your business is societal models, planned obsolescence is part of the deal.

Re: Individuals Matter

#98

Post by sangnoir »

ncmncm wrote: post #82
Swizec wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs: there are no 10x engineers!! Orgs: okay you are indistinguishable cogs and we will treat you as cattle Devs: no wait not like that Truth is everyone knows that who or which teams takes a task matters immensely. We know that if Bob leads it’s gonna suck and if Alice does it’s gonna rock and finish on time. Managers know this also. But we’ve constructed a corporate culture where this is not allowed to be said. So…

Not only are there 10x engineers, I personally know an objectively measured 500x engineer. He is humble because he knows someone who produces 10x what he does (albeit spending twice as much time at it). The measurement happened as a result of a joint venture between Siemens AG and Ericsson called Ellemtel. Each company sent 250 [edit: not 500] engineers. It was a six month project, the classic death march: if it did…

LoC is a terrible metric - did they count the lines other engineers removed?

I was half of a very productive duo on a greenfield project subsystem - a project I joined midway: my partner wrote a lot of code, I estimate ~70% of final lines in the code base were his. What the LoC count won't tell you is all the refactoring, deletion, tests and error handling code I had to add, because his code only worked for the happy path. Can you say he was being 2x more productive than I was? I say no, because he was breaking the nightly build at least once a week before I joined, blocking the rest of the team, this ended when I added pre-commit tests.

Re: Individuals Matter

#99

Post by hinkley »

csee wrote: post #16

Realizing this is important for retention. It's damaging when upper management falsely thinks people are interchangeble, which is a common view among non-technical types and HR. This leads to 10x people feeling underappreciated and resentful, ultimately causing them to resign for higher compensation and more appreciation elsewhere. It can literally destroy small companies if an individual's unique contribution isn't…

What I've experienced at companies on a death spiral is that there are a few people everyone can agree are useless, and beyond that you start picking people based on your poor understanding of how the sausage is actually made.

Once someone really useful has been let go, you have the sudden realization that your situation isn't that different than theirs. If management can misunderstand Tim's value, they sure as hell can misunderstand yours. At which point everyone's productivity is compromised by existential dread, and the wheels just start coming off faster.

Re: Individuals Matter

#100

Post by hinkley »

jnwatson wrote: post #84

Deciding that your attrition is too low is like determining your days between accidents is too low.

I think attrition can be low as long as your team is steadily growing. No attrition can lead to no new people, and no new people is often the bigger problem.

A stable team becomes an echo chamber and/or rant fest. Certain arguments have already been won, right or wrong, and others can never be won.

New people come in and ask dumb questions that upset the status quo. They often are the only people who can.

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