[HN Gopher] "Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
___________________________________________________________________
"Normal" engineers are the key to great teams
Author : jnord
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-03-13 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| ultra-boss wrote:
| "A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly
| normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an
| ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship
| code, respond to users, understand the systems they've built, and
| move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by
| week."
|
| plus plus plus plus plus to this.
| slindsey wrote:
| This is the key message in my opinion. I've worked with
| wonderful software developers who can accomplish far more than
| others (as well as a few who are a net drain on the team.) The
| key is to craft an organization that allows anyone with a
| minimum skillset to be successful. At least on the team that
| I'm currently in, this means a well-defined organization with
| clearly defined limits of what they should and should not do.
| This is with respect to customers and also internally.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| And to achieve this the organization only requires exceptional
| leaders...
| Muromec wrote:
| I want to believe, but has anymore ever worked at such great
| organization?
| rqmedes wrote:
| And who leads and sets the vision. A committee of "average"
| engineers?
| nullpoint420 wrote:
| Most 10x engineers I've met are usually very creative and care
| deeply about the user experience and keeping code maintainable
| over time.
|
| Most 1x developers just care about getting the job done
| regardless of care or code quality, which in my experience has
| led to conflict.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I like 5x developers that get the job done and don't spend the
| additional 5x over engineering the work -- causing the 1x
| engineers to disengage.
|
| Some engineers have an obsessive, sometimes compulsive, nature
| which is actually at odds with the business. These types
| usually spent a large amount of time in institutionalized
| learning settings and will be far more opinionated about how
| their labor is allocated.
| n_ary wrote:
| I believe, you have got the multipliers switched.
|
| Most 1x engineers/developers care deeply about users and the
| end product, and also likes to keep the code well maintained
| and performant, so they can do their peaceful work and go home,
| while not making the life of the user any more miserable.
|
| Most 10x engineers are too brilliant and remain busy rocking
| the boat and doing so many mind blowing things at any given
| time that the destruction trail is only materialising slowly
| once their presence has faded for a while and the remnants are
| being pieced together.
|
| I think, we equate the frenzy with 10x(productivity &
| excellence) while the less creative and cautious ones tend to
| be the most valuable over long term with most boring stuff.
|
| Of course to each their own, but the too many destructions of
| the 10x stars had made me very weary these days.
| gmm1990 wrote:
| Are there any open source repositories where this is an
| example? I keep hearing the 10x people ruin everything but I
| wouldn't call that person 10x. I don't understand how it's
| objectionable that some people are more productive than
| others.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| The question is in _how_ they 're productive. If they're
| productive because they're effectively cutting corners and
| leaving a wake of tech debt others have to clean up then
| _they_ are productive while slowing down their team (or
| worse, the company) as a whole.
| whstl wrote:
| Anyone that has been doing this job knows that the
| majority of average developers in any workplace will also
| cut corners every once in a while and leave a lot of tech
| debt to others, with very few exceptions.
|
| This myth that more productive developers are somehow
| worse and will ruin projects is just rationalization
| without any ground in reality.
| pests wrote:
| I have a buddy that helped me out with some
| DIY/construction projects. He thinks he is a 10x as well
| since he gets so much done so quickly. He will finish up
| and sit down saying its done. I go look and every tool is
| literally everywhere, garbage and debris thrown about, and
| half the stuff is incorrectly installed as he didn't think
| he needed to read the instructions and missed key details.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Hard disagree. If they don't consistently write maintainable
| and reliable code, they are not 10x engineer no matter how
| smart they are.
|
| e.g. Linus is a classic 10x or 100x engineer and his
| code(Linux, Git etc) has been maintained by a completely
| uncoordinated team for decades.
| whstl wrote:
| Wait... "Most" 1x engineers? "Most" in any profession will be
| average. Which is completely normal and fine.
|
| This kind of reply is just flipping the stereotype and going
| in another insane extreme without any evidence at all, just
| conflating productivity with recklessness...
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| Most "1x" engineers are a drag on the business. Complacent.
| Don't care about business goals.
|
| And the 10x you mentioned are not 10x. They are 1x with
| frenzy.
|
| If one is not multiplying the team output, they are simply 1x
| or lower (maybe a few exceptions)
| Nevermark wrote:
| Someone imagining they are brilliant doesn't make them
| brilliant.
|
| More so if in the light of day their work sucks.
|
| Discussions about 10x engineers are not about "wannabe 10x
| engineers".
|
| --
|
| I have yet to come across an intellectual area where there
| isn't a long tail of higher talent.
|
| As the "x" goes up they just get more rare in reality, and
| even rarer to see. Because they are not always being
| optimally challenged. Most problems are mundane. And
| optimally challenging workers isn't really a business plan
| for anything.
|
| I think there is such thing as a 10x problem, which you have
| to find before your 10x engineer really shines. Identifying
| hard but exceptionally valuable problems to solve takes 10x
| vision. And time and luck.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| You really can over-hire and I've seen it happen in many
| shops
|
| If a "10x engineer" is not given 10x problems, they will..
| create some.
| jajko wrote:
| I've rarely seen those 10x engineers to bring massive long term
| added value. Most are/were well aware of their skills and
| detested working on anything but newest and shiniest,
| desperately trying to make work a fun park for them regardless
| whether its actually a good idea for the company giving them
| paychecks.
|
| Which works for some time, or when extensively coached, but
| eventually they move since their time is oh so precious and now
| you have the rest of the team to work with their work. Not that
| great.
|
| Then people wonder or complain when business doesn't appreciate
| devs. How would you look at folks who are critical to your
| success yet often don't have your company's best interest at
| the center of their efforts.
|
| To use your terms, those 1x devs always end up maintaining and
| evolving that code of 10x guys. Their velocity with changes is
| massively lower and error rate is significantly higher compared
| to code created by 1x devs. This is what business sees and
| there is not much love for that.
| lysace wrote:
| > I've rarely seen those 10x engineers to bring massive long
| term added value.
|
| I've seen it first-hand. We ended up building a support team
| around the 10x:er to keep things working, but it was easily
| worth it. It worked very well for the life span of the
| product - about a decade.
|
| Many eventually graduated to pretty fancy places. They
| learned a lot. This particular 10x:er loved sharing knowledge
| via pair-programming.
|
| Well, he was always in command of the keyboard (typing
| insanely fast), but you'd sit next to him and he'd delight in
| explaining. Eventually you would challenge him on something
| and then the collaboration/adventure began.
|
| I have had the most intellectually exhilarating times of my
| life working with this guy.
|
| So yeah, 10x:ers can bring massive value if they are wired to
| be really nice.
| Muromec wrote:
| >Then people wonder or complain when business doesn't
| appreciate devs. How would you look at folks who are critical
| to your success yet often don't have your company's best
| interest at the center of their efforts.
|
| Does the company have my best interests at the center of
| their efforts or I can be shown the door at any given moment
| to please shareholders? No hard feeling pls, it's just
| business and I have only one life to enjoy.
| whstl wrote:
| Yeah, after joining management I'm 100% behind this
| thinking.
|
| Anyone wanting to improve their resume or have fun from 9
| to 5 is in the right here. Life is short.
|
| However it is my responsibility as a manager to ensure the
| team is working towards its goals and nobody is making
| anyone's life difficult.
| jaggederest wrote:
| I like this article particularly because I think the trope that
| there's something unique and different about software engineering
| is pretty toxic, both to we people in the field and people
| looking to employ people in the field.
|
| These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field,
| finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for
| personal valor.
|
| It's laudable to do your work well and go home to the rest of
| your life, and working "extreme" hours is both a bad policy and a
| bad sign that the system you're operating in is brittle. Nothing
| that we do is so unique that another competent engineer shouldn't
| be able to fill in for you when you are having an off day.
|
| The effect of consistent, careful, workmanlike effort over time
| trumps any number of crunch weeks and burnout episodes, to an
| almost absurd degree.
| ultra-boss wrote:
| Couldn't agree more. I read a book (okay, I half read a
| book...I couldn't finish it, it was so bad) where the author (a
| marketer!) argued that software engineers are the most
| skeptical audience, and I was like, "Um, have you ever met an
| investigative journalist? Or people in the many many other
| professions that require skepticism and analytical thinking?"
|
| The sooner the software engineering field can be rid of its
| beliefs about the inherent brilliance of programmers, the
| better for everyone involved. Inlcuding software engineers!
| lovich wrote:
| >These days it feels a bit like another well known toxic field,
| finance, in that people conflate an outsized leverage for
| personal valor.
|
| Didn't we pass the rubicon on that in the early 2010s? I
| personally don't feel that its "like" finance but that its the
| exact same behaviors from the exact same set of people.
|
| Once tech stopped being a bunch of nerds in a basement and
| started being a source of wealth and power, it attracted a
| whole slew of intelligent and wealth seeking individuals who
| would have gone to wall street previously. Its not like the
| math skills don't have a heavy overlap already.
|
| And well, now that they're here, we see all the same power
| games being played with the same results
| strangattractor wrote:
| I was once considered a 10X. I would work all night. Rewrite
| code simply because I found it objectionable - lots of things
| I'd never do now. Mostly after working those long hours I
| return after a long rest and spend most of my time fixing all
| the new and ridiculous problems I created while working tired.
| Things may have gotten done a little faster. Never once did it
| even matter - there was no material benefit to the company.
| Projects still got canceled - team deadlines still missed -
| products still had bugs - company focus changed blah blah blah.
|
| Focus is a supper power. Not getting diverted with trivial
| shit. Don't get distracted , avoid creating more work for
| yourself and others. Todays me would find yesterdays me a -10X
| annoyance.
| nntwozz wrote:
| "Focusing is about saying no." -- Steve Jobs
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgL8fpya8BA
| awesome_dude wrote:
| > Never once did it even matter - there was no material
| benefit to the company.
|
| I think that the idea of having people (at startups) working
| at a frenetic pace is because
|
| 1. The VC money is running low 2. Being first to market used
| to be a major determining factor on whether the product would
| succeed or fail
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| So you 10x'd in wrong direction. Doesn't mean something else
| can't 10x in the right direction.
| logsr wrote:
| > 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 of something has
| increased. in the beginning i only looked at the technical
| details of the implementation, and then over time that
| expanded to considering maintainability, team co-ordination,
| business objectives, etc.
|
| the potential scope here is unlimited. when you start, just
| making something compile takes all of your focus, but over
| time as programming becomes reflexive you are able to expand
| the factors you take into account far beyond the immediate
| code, and it seems trivial by comparison.
| noosphr wrote:
| Software is different.
|
| All other engineering disciplines are ultimately limited to
| building things in (at most) 3 euclidean dimensions. There is
| only so much junk you can hide in a finite volume of space.
|
| Code by comparison lives in hyperbolic space [0] and you can
| hide _anything_ in such a space without it being obvious. This
| is exemplified by the unpleasant discovery all of us have had
| of a supposedly peripheral folder holding source code called
| all over the code base and the near impossibility of moving it
| in a location that makes sense for it without having to
| refactor the whole code base.
|
| People, including myself, have a seriously bad intuition just
| how much volume there is in a space which grows at least
| exponentially.
|
| The closest discipline to software engineering is mathematics
| and that has an even worse track record. There's the folklore
| about half of all math papers giving the wrong proof for the
| right conclusion. By comparison software engineering only gets
| catastrophic bugs less than every other time a program is run.
|
| [0] All trees are natively embedded in some hyperbolic space of
| whatever curvature matches the average number of children per
| node, and all code can be ultimately represented as a tree.
| tkahnoski wrote:
| I think maybe this misses the mark. Yes software can lead to
| unbounded complexity unlikely many physics based engineering
| disciplines.
|
| However, at the end of the day, there is an input and output
| and compute and memory needed to run the thing and if we look
| at that we realize, we never actually left the bounded
| physical realm and we can still engineer software systems
| against real world constraints. We can judge its efficiency
| and breaking points.
|
| What's very different is the cost to change the system to do
| something new and that's where this unbounded complexity
| blows up in our face.
| noosphr wrote:
| >However, at the end of the day, there is an input and
| output and compute and memory needed to run the thing and
| if we look at that we realize, we never actually left the
| bounded physical realm and we can still engineer software
| systems against real world constraints. We can judge its
| efficiency and breaking points.
|
| This is a common sense view of computation that's
| unfortunately wrong.
|
| The simplest counter example is the busy beaver program:
| with as little as 12 states we have saturated the
| computational capabilities of the universe, but it looks
| completely safe and sane for the first few states you would
| be testing against.
|
| You may call it pathological, and you'd be right, but the
| point is that you never know under which rug a function
| that takes more computation than the universe can supply is
| hiding.
|
| By comparison power electronics engineers don't have to
| formally prove that they didn't accidentally include a
| nuclear power plant in their e-scooter design.
| shafyy wrote:
| I don't know, man. Your comment is neither here nor there.
| knowsuchagency wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| What makes software unique to other engineering disciplines
| is that it isn't a discipline at all. What makes software so
| great is how quick the iteration cycles are.
|
| Software sits at a higher abstraction level than physical
| hardware, so much of our time is spent throwing at the wall
| and seeing what sticks because that's often (although not
| always) the best use of time.
| sroussey wrote:
| The methodology is unconstrained as another way to put it.
|
| Which, indeed, is different from engineering where
| constraints are non-negotiable, and thus the methodology as
| well.
|
| I think a lot of people doing functional programming, as an
| example, enjoy the constraints and the discipline that it
| imbues on their craft.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| You can hide ANYTHING with financial engineering. Like off-
| books liabilities, systemic risk ... anything.
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| Yet, it is trivial to find "competent engineer" in other fields
| and software engineering is filled with mediocre ones at best.
|
| When there's 1000 ways to do a thing, with wildly different
| pros and cons, and insane amount of unknowns in a field that is
| evolving so rapidly that it is (near) impossible for someone to
| keep up, being "competent" is not easy.
| wiggidy wrote:
| "Measuring productivity is fraught and imperfect" For the moment,
| but it's better than it's ever been, and it's getting better.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Not really. How do you quantify tech debt? How do you quantify
| the tradeoffs that someone made to add new functionality?
|
| This is always going to have a critical subjective element to
| it.
|
| The moment you start treating engineers like factory floor
| workers, that's what you get.
| Muromec wrote:
| >Not really. How do you quantify tech debt? How do you
| quantify the tradeoffs that someone made to add new
| functionality?
|
| Time is quantifiable and comparable. Time spent on making
| things happen and then dealing with the consequences. The
| percentage of people leaving the organization in their first
| year is quantifiable.
|
| Tech debt and tradeoffs from the previous feature will show
| up either as time spent on adding the next one or time spent
| on fixing bugs. Estimating is difficult, but measuring and
| figuring out post factum what amount of time was spent on yak
| shaving isn't exactly impossible. It maybe be uncomfortable
| and self incriminating, but that's a culture problem.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What ratio of time spent coding to time spent doing code review
| is conventional in industry, anyway?
|
| If it is around 1 (which doesn't seem too unreasonable given that
| multiple people might review a single commit), and a 10x engineer
| really is 10x as productive as a normal one, then I guess a team
| of less than 10 people will have trouble keeping up with these
| 10x engineers.
|
| Unless the company only hires 10x engineers. But then we should
| at least consider the possibility that they are just hiring 1x
| engineers, and have a low opinion of engineers outside the
| company.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| >"A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly
| normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an
| ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship
| code, respond to users, understand the systems they've built, and
| move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by
| week."
|
| I don't think decent skills and ordinary expertise gets you that,
| especially "move fast" on top of the other things. But the
| convenient thing about "normal" is I can move the goal posts
| wherever and it sounds valid.
|
| The article also did not say how often the normal engineers
| produce bugs of varying severity, so I guess it's possible to
| move fast and create a manageable amount of bugs?
| fatbird wrote:
| Decent skills and ordinary expertise requires a good process
| and a healthy team/work environment, and then it's totally
| possible. I've never worked with rock stars, and I'm not one
| myself. The difference between getting things done at a good,
| steady pace without building technical debt (which is all that
| moving fast really is) has always been process and product
| owner.
| beastman82 wrote:
| Every 10x engineer I've known has carried entire teams of normal
| engineers. ymmv but I've seen probably 5 instances of this and 0
| instances of teams of normal engineers being super productive.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| What are the details of this? Any engineer that built most of
| the stuff is not a 10x engineer. It's someone that really knows
| their way around their own house.
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| "If you must 10x something, build 10x engineering teams"
|
| This is a healthy perspective that hopefully avoids some of the
| controversy around the 10x label. Any improvement you make to how
| the team works together, be it CI process, sharing/evaluating
| ideas, code reviews, design, anything, is multiplied by the team
| size/responsibilities. Maybe high-functioning teams are part of
| what enable the 10x outputs that perpetuates the meme.
|
| From what I remember in mythical man month it's sort of addressed
| there (different roles/support roles being just as critical as
| others) and recently reading "soul of a new machine" it was clear
| how dependent even the most skilled roles were on the other
| members.
|
| How to hire and build a 10x engineering team remains a
| challenging problem however!
| somekyle2 wrote:
| Some of the problem in the conversation around this is that many
| people take "1x engineer" to mean "not particularly competent
| engineer" and some take it to mean "baseline, solid contributor
| who isn't exceptional", and the bar for what we regard as
| exceptional can differ drastically. I've been on teams where
| everyone is pretty good and felt like I was a genius, I've been
| on teams with really remarkable people and felt unworthy. Nobody
| knows or agrees what 'x' is or that it can even be reasonably
| measured, so all conversations about 'x' multipliers tend to be
| unproductive.
| superconduct123 wrote:
| I think 10x is an exaggeration but I've found its really common
| to have 1-2 people who do a big bulk of the work
|
| The thing I don't understand personally with these people is why
| they care so much about work when the rewards are not
| proportionate to doing so much extra work.
|
| I get it if you're a founder of a startup but not if you're at a
| big company
|
| Yet every big company I've worked at there are always 1-2 people
| on the team who seem completely obsessed with the project, like
| its their main hobby/purpose
|
| If someone is so smart that they can do "10x" the work, would
| they not use that smartness to look at the meta of it all and
| wonder why they don't get 10x the rewards?
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| Some people just really like the work they do. There's nothing
| more to it than that.
| Muromec wrote:
| Sometimes it isn't even that I like to do something, I just
| have a very strong feeling it has to be done. The code is
| asking to be written, the energy has to be spent to lower the
| entropy. But at least nowdays I can close the damn work
| laptop at time and not open it until the morning, unlike some
| a decade or two ago.
| behrlich wrote:
| > completely obsessed with the project, like it's their main
| hobby/purpose
|
| I think you figured it out.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| If your main hobby or purpose is to make someone else rich
| you're a slave.
| hakaneskici wrote:
| I worked like this. You could have phrased it better.
| Muromec wrote:
| That honestly doesn't matter if you (no longer) pursue
| riches yourself, have enough already and enjoy your
| hobbies. Besides, not everyone working in IT is working in
| a chique billionarie mill. A lot of IT is just plumbing.
| Majority even.
| dnissley wrote:
| if you also make yourself rich in the process, are you
| still a slave?
| incrudible wrote:
| Imagine taking pride in your craft rather than doing only
| the bare minimum to pad your ego, what a crazy approach!
| aabdi wrote:
| it's sorta like, why doesn't everyone just kill themselves you
| know?
|
| sometimes, you just find fun in things and it's cool. other
| times, it's like what other other thing you gonna do? fish or
| hang with people or do drugs or dance? software's a hobby
| really. sometimes its more fun.
|
| but really it's all preference.
| Muromec wrote:
| >The thing I don't understand personally with these people is
| why they care so much about work when the rewards are not
| proportionate to doing so much extra work.
|
| The reward is there allright, it just isn't monetary.
| hakaneskici wrote:
| You're right. Coming from my own startup to Microsoft, I worked
| the same way for quite a long time. Huge regret.
| parliament32 wrote:
| [delayed]
| mkl95 wrote:
| An average engineer with solid problem-solving skills and a good
| manager is like a ~3x engineer. It's way easier to hire a few of
| those than a 10x engineer. But you need to match them up with a
| good manager, and that isn't easy.
| threatofrain wrote:
| When people say "average" they're trying to reach for a concept
| of 1x engineer, not 3x engineer.
| mkl95 wrote:
| When I think of a 1x engineer, I think of all the guys I've
| worked with that had a decade plus of experience but were
| advanced beginners at best. If you don't work for a FAANG
| company, you will be surrounded by those types. They make the
| same mistakes over and over and write the same unreadable
| code, year after year.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| The other important thing to consider is that 10x engineers are
| deemed so based on productivity. But productivity isn't
| necessarily the be all end all.
|
| In fact, an arguably more important skill is know when _not_ to
| do something and how to avoid tech debt. Building towards a north
| star sustainably and incrementally in such a way that pivots
| along the way don 't require major bandaids or rewrites is how a
| good engineering org operates.
|
| In the real world a lot of 10x engineers end up just launching a
| bunch of hacky garbage to frontload impact and leave the cleanup
| for everyone else. This can work for some time in organizations
| with phenomenal build and test infrastructure; however, it
| eventually becomes crippling and hinders everyone's velocity.
| vrnvu wrote:
| > 10x engineers have dark backgrounds, are rarely seen doing
| user-interface work, and are poor mentors and interviewers
|
| If you think a great (10x) engineer has bad social skills, isn't
| a good mentor, and isn't a strong teammate... you've never
| actually worked with one. What truly makes someone a great
| engineer is being technically impeccable and having next-level
| soft skills.
| romanhn wrote:
| Exactly. While 10x (or whatever) is possible on pure technical
| ability, I would argue that the majority of engineers who
| provide outsized value do so through enabling others to do
| their best work and unblocking the wave that raises all the
| boats, rather than coding by themselves in a dark room.
| matwood wrote:
| Exactly. The way a 10x engineer really 10x's is by leveling
| up the entire team.
| jt2190 wrote:
| Not sure if this was your intention, but you've pulled these
| words out of context, making it seem like the author is making
| this claim, when in fact the author writes that to describe
| what _others_ claim.
|
| > Most of us have encountered a few software engineers who seem
| practically magician-like, a class apart from the rest of us in
| their ability to reason about complex mental models, leap to
| nonobvious yet elegant solutions, or emit waves of high-quality
| code at unreal velocity.
|
| > I have run into many of these incredible beings over the
| course of my career. I think their existence is what explains
| the curious durability of the notion of a "10x engineer,"
| someone who is 10 times as productive or skilled as their
| peers. The idea--which has become a meme--is based on flimsy,
| shoddy research, and the claims people have made to defend it
| have often been risible (for example, 10x engineers have dark
| backgrounds, are rarely seen doing user-interface work, and are
| poor mentors and interviewers) or blatantly double down on
| stereotypes ("we look for young dudes in hoodies who remind us
| of Mark Zuckerberg"). But damn if it doesn't resonate with
| experience. It just feels true.
|
| > I don't have a problem with the idea that there are engineers
| who are 10 times as productive as other engineers. The problems
| I do have are twofold.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > 10x engineers have dark backgrounds
|
| I think this is true, but in the metaphorical sense hah. Few
| with a happy childhood end up this way.
| lalaithion wrote:
| I once worked with a 10x engineer who I could hand new backend
| APIs to and have a brand new ui component that supported the
| behavior in less than a day, consistently. I have worked with
| 10x engineers who spend hours on calls walking junior engineers
| through problems they're having. That's part of being a 10x
| engineer - what this article is talking about is random 1x
| engineers with a chip on their shoulder and unshakeable
| arrogance.
| TriangleEdge wrote:
| I think kind, industrious, and smart people make great teams.
|
| I once took up a lot of space to be a super productive engineer
| and only ended up being isolated. The business saw that some
| engineers were saying things worked great and were easy, so more
| responsibility was thrown on me and the other engineers moved to
| another project that needed headcount. Me and another guy ended
| up building on and maintaining what used be a reasonably sized
| team. It got on me because I made sure to know everything so I
| could make it as great as I could. This sounds good, but this
| particular business didn't care about me at all, I was just
| another gear.
|
| I've met "productive" engineers that got things done really
| quickly from the business perspective, then moved on to being
| awesome somewhere else. But, they also took shortcuts, didn't
| write documentation, and made things unmaintainable. When I
| joined the team after they were being awesome somewhere else, I
| had to do things like guess hostnames and find out how and where
| things were running..
|
| The people I've liked working with the most have been parents.
| The boundaries are more clear, they value stability, and aren't
| heros.
| valiant55 wrote:
| > I had to do things like guess hostnames and find out how and
| where things were running..
|
| This isn't the worst thing in the world. I'd rather inherit
| something with little/no documentation that followed the
| standard business practices (e.g naming conventions, nothing
| crazy bespoke) and have to do an afternoon of investigation
| than have to read documentation that's inaccurate. Of course
| the best option is full documenation but due to the nature of
| business that isn't always possible.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Even Google eventually realized that if all you incentivize is
| 10x engineers, you end up with a sack of cats clawing at each
| other for advancement perpetually and spend a fortune on trying
| to retain enough institutional knowledge to do the keep-the-
| lights-on work. They removed the "Engineers at this level are
| expected to continuously improve and seek more responsibility"
| language from several higher rungs of their expectations ladder.
| ein0p wrote:
| As a manager, you want a report who does not require handholding,
| cajoling, or close supervision. You want someone who makes
| problems disappear. It's fine if they're 1x engineer. It's fine
| if they pick up their shit at 5PM no matter what and leave for
| dinner. Just do what you're supposed to do, at a predictable
| cadence. That's all that's really required in 90% of the teams.
| renewiltord wrote:
| This stuff is that self-indulgent pablum that comes from the
| genre of "poor are happier than rich" and such. It's always
| reinforced by the mediocre because everyone wants to believe
| they're key to something. The long and short of it is that the
| people who are buying your work are adequate determiners of how
| key you are.
| bjornsing wrote:
| There are 10x engineers, and 100x, and 1000x. The only thing
| required to separate the wheat from the chaff is a hard enough
| problem. Now deal with it.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| When did IEEE become host to clickbait nonsense? This whole take
| feels like an editorial by a junior engineer going off vibes.
| It's all off-base, from the misunderstanding of how to measure
| productivity, to what output matters, to the idea that there is
| such a thing as a "normal" software engineer. It's kind of
| embarrassing.
| rqmedes wrote:
| Best take so far
| didgetmaster wrote:
| I worked for a couple companies during my career whose main
| product was incredibly complex and difficult to understand.
| Making a minor change in one component could send ripples through
| the whole product.
|
| One or two 'superstar' engineers who had been with the project
| for more than a decade were the only ones who understood the bulk
| of it. They had job security!
|
| I often wondered if they intentionally created it to be that way
| out of self interest. It made things rough for all the 'normal'
| engineers who wanted to improve things but got pushback from them
| and management.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > "Engineers don't own software, teams own software"
|
| This is often the opposite of the truth. That is, teams are much
| more often formally-owning software, but "owning" in the sense of
| actually being responsible and feeling responsible for its
| functioning, well-being, and strive towards polish and
| realization of potential - more often than not, it's one or a few
| individuals. If it's a large software system, a lot of people
| have to put in their work as well, but still.
|
| I am occasionally in a situation where I feel more "ownership"
| towards a software project I have no formal responsibility for
| than I believe the formal owners do, and find the, to be poor
| stewards of that software. Not that I have the time to take over
| for them, but I have the motivation, and it pains me to see them
| mistreat it and mar it with unworthy merges.
|
| PS - I am not speaking as a supposed "10x engineer".
| d--b wrote:
| Why shouldn't there be a continuous range of skill? Why should we
| want normal engineers instead of you know "good" ones, or even
| "really good" ones?
|
| Oh and also, it wouldn't hurt to qualify those skills to the
| specific domain to which they apply. Like "he's a really good
| database engineer" or "he's a great C# guy, but terrible at
| DevOps"
|
| These articles are polarizing because they take for original
| assumption that the real world is discontinuous. That's stupid.
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