High Performance Individuals and Teams
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High Performance Individuals and Teams
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Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#2I’ve been fortunate in my career thus far, since I was about 14 or so, to have always been in the company of at least one “10x”’er on each of my teams, as the cliche goes. They’re dispersed through various companies nowadays - Stripe, Twitch, Google, FB, Discord, etc etc. But it was interesting and beneficial for me to work alongside them if only because I had decent role models to follow.
This article first puts up a straw man and then switches gears halfway into a different subject. See if you can spot it.
There is no exaggeration. Some people are just far more in tune with the mental models required to do good software work at both a micro and macro level, that any time I see someone trying to play it down I have to ask if these individuals have worked with one of these precocious talented folks.
I also sometimes struggle to understand why anyone would write an article like this. You obviously want to hire the best you can for the best price you can. Anything else is a silly coping mechanism that you can’t face with honesty.
I want to read an article that’s straightforward about how much good work 10x’ers can do and how influential they can be for rest of the team. But this isn’t an article anyone would bother writing because they’re too busy making money to have dick measuring competitions on an online news board.
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#3I’ve been fortunate in my career thus far, since I was about 14 or so, to have always been in the company of at least one “10x”’er on each of my teams, as the cliche goes. They’re dispersed through various companies nowadays - Stripe, Twitch, Google, FB, Discord, etc etc. But it was interesting and beneficial for me to work alongside them if only because I had decent role models to follow. This article first puts up…
I feel the same way, anyone who does not believe in the 10x engineer has just never met one. Sometimes the software they produce is absolutely stunning.
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#4"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god."
This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure their code in order to maintain full control over it. It's job security and furthermore if it's a valuable piece of the product then it can keep praise and rewards centered on you. We should also not be quick to blame the individual for perpetuating this, the right incentives need to be in place to reward both team progress and individual progress.
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#5"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god." This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure…
> An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure their code in order to maintain full control over it.
That's fair, but I've also seen an orthogonal effect happen maybe more often where an engineer structures code just naturally in a way that fits them well, but is poorly understood by others. Not due to the incentives of maintaining control or job security. But simply because the engineer wasn't talented at making good code for other humans, and there were very few incentives to write code good for other people, at least early on in the design.
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#6"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god." This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure…
> An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure their code in order to maintain full control over it. That's fair, but I've also seen an orthogonal effect happen maybe more often where an engineer structures code just naturally in a way that fits them well, but is poorly understood by others. Not due to the incentives of maintaining control or job sec…
It's also that sometimes they stay on that codebase because they weren't the best engineer, and all the better ones move on to bigger things.
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#7I’ve been fortunate in my career thus far, since I was about 14 or so, to have always been in the company of at least one “10x”’er on each of my teams, as the cliche goes. They’re dispersed through various companies nowadays - Stripe, Twitch, Google, FB, Discord, etc etc. But it was interesting and beneficial for me to work alongside them if only because I had decent role models to follow. This article first puts up…
I feel the same way, anyone who does not believe in the 10x engineer has just never met one. Sometimes the software they produce is absolutely stunning.
Or, alternatively, the 0.1x engineer and the -10x engineer. (Or worse, the -10x PM.)
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#8"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god." This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure…
> It's job security and furthermore if it's a valuable piece of the product then it can keep praise and rewards centered on you.
That's part of it, but training people is also very difficult. If you know a system well it takes a day to add some feature, but it takes a few days of frustration to train someone else.
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#9"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god." This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure…
I don’t work in this kind of environment. What is an example of a common team based incentive?
Re: High Performance Individuals and Teams
#10"If you find a project where only one person know what is going on, chances are that person is not good at writing code for humans, not that is a coding god." This is hard for many to grasp, but if you get the opportunity to lead enough teams it will become clear. And it makes sense, if you think about it. An individual who ended up owning a particular piece of a codebase will be incentivized to obfuscate and obscure…
Maybe I've just dealt with good cultures but I find this a bit cynical. Normally when there have been too few people who knew a section of code, it was because:
- The area of code has a high ramp up, high risk, and few new work incentivizing ramping up on it.
- The curse of knowledge makes it hard for the person familiar with the code to know what is needed for others to understand it. Incentives are needed to encourage learning by others to force the maintainer to better understand how to explain things. This isn't a judgement on the person in their general inability to write code for humans nor is it about obfuscation.