Because progress is for the most part iteration?
Why Great Engineering Orgs Thrive on "Normal" Engineers
Submitted 5 weeks ago by MuskyMelon@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://spectrum.ieee.org/10x-engineer
Comments
Viri4thus@feddit.org 5 weeks ago
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 5 weeks ago
I feel like part of the problem is that management wants staff that can do a wide range of tasks when it ends up creating a staff that can’t specialize in a small group of tasks.
I’ve seen plenty of times where people can operate well as a cog on a big machine, but fall apart when they have to work in roles that require a variety of skillsets. Larger engineering companies can typically create enough work for people to specialize in smaller tasks than smaller engineering companies.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 weeks ago
Implying engineers are normal
Alekzzand3r@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Without reading the article, my guess would be because they give their engineers enough time to do their best work.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I won’t read the article now, but
arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance
this is bullshit, a categorical statement.
There are good processes and there are bad processes. Good processes are usually functional for people of (sensibly) different mindsets and mental conditions. Bad processes are usually “one size fits all” in one way or another.
There are things a team can’t have, and there are things a talented individual can’t have.
There’s also experience that covers holes one can’t plan for, yep.
Lexam@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
LIES! It’s us unstable ones that carry EVERYTHING!
ccunix@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
The archetype of the 10x engineer is called “Brent”
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
I’m so sick of this “moving fast” mindset. The result is my newsletter being full of security hole and hacked.
HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
In the very first real programmer job that had, back in 1986, the IT department estimated that they had a 51 man-year backlog of development work. That would have translated to two or three calendar years of work. Probably more, considering how crappy estimates always are, and the always under-estimate.
It turns out that this is pretty much the industry standard. Virtually ever place I worked for the next 35 years had a similar size of backlog. And that backlog isn’t standing still, either. All you can hope is that 3 more years worth of new requests don’t come in during the two years it takes to complete what you already have.
Some of those new things are going to have a higher priority than stuff that’s already in the backlog. The reality is that some item that’s down at the low end of the list is going to get bumped down, again and again, and never get done. Or it’s going to someday become an urgent priority that can’t wait any more.
So the pressure is always intense for the developers to go faster, faster, faster. And the business doesn’t understand or care about good engineering practices, even though the shit hits the fan when a critical bug gets released to production. And God help you if that backlog of 51 man-years has grown to 70 after a year because of the technical debt you introduced trying to go faster.
The fight to rein in scope is constant. At that first job, the head of the department told us, “to build Volkswagens, not Cadillacs”. It was laughable, because they were struggling to keep up while building Skodas.
You can’t just add more programmers because the productive backbone of the development team is a group of programmers that have all been there for at least 5 years and they are domain experts. It’s going take at least 5 years to bring new hires up to that level of knowledge.
And that’s all three sides of the project triangle: scope/quality, resources and time. You can’t meaningfully add resources, scope’s already stripped down to bare bones and the time is too long.
And the truth is that every one of those projects in that 51 man-years backlog is important, even critical, to some aspect of the business. But the development process is unfathomable to muggles, so can’t you just go faster? Can’t you wring a bit more productivity out of those domain experts?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 5 weeks ago
The joke is, i had to explain the concept of “technical debt” to the “supercoder” that did most of the programming in my last company.
kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.
To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.
Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.
prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I’m bragging when I say this: A decade ago, I rewrote an indecipherable mess of code into an elegant and transparent procedure, nestled comfortably inside every sanity/insanity check I could think of for the situation. Today, that code (aside from an update for a vulnerable dependency) is still running just the way I wrote it.
Releases should be fast and rare.