11 ms·

One of the first mentions* I saw on HN about the elusive 10xer was an article about the exact types of gains the author of this article is talking about -- a 10

• LoSboccacc 11y ago
  sadly it's precisely what business are not gonna doing. measuring developers by LOC instead of business outcome allows to detach their worth from their productivity, albeit the metric is flawed in many ways it's better to say 'you produced X LOC, here's a 100$ raise' than 'your solution saved us 100M$, here's a 100$ raise'
  • zwischenzug 11y ago
    Does this still happen? I've never seen anyone judged by this standard, and I've been in the industry for 15+ years.
    • LoSboccacc 11y ago
      me neither tbh, but it was a relatable sample. there still are plenty bullshit metrics out there at the same level of LOC, I used the worse to get the point out
      • sokoloff 11y ago
        I can confirm that I've seen "number of tickets closed" many times and "number of wiki edits" used in the wild in an evaluative/comparative context.
      • Consultant32452 11y ago
        Number of tickets closed is a great example.
        • ck425 11y ago
          I've been judged on this before. Me and a colleague were working on a system slightly different to others in our dept so the tickets got kicked around for ages after we'd done our bit. My manager kept pointing out how few tickets I'd closed. He eventually realised his error after both myself and said colleagues manager pointed out why but still occasionally referred to it in performance reviews. Moral of the story for me was: a) Figure out asap how a particular manager tracks your work. b) Get your own way to measure productivity so if/when it comes up you can say 'wait a minute I've done x'
          • ryandrake 11y ago
            or c) optimize your use of the tool to beat the metric. This doesn't necessarily require you to change how you're doing your job. The metric is "more tickets closed?" Great! Let's file more and more granular tickets for each and every sub-task, so that we can close hundreds of them a month. Sales people know this. They might not even know algebra, but if you make their commission/bonus dependent on a KPI that depends on multiple variables with multiple weightings, they will turn into Einstein overnight to optimize their behavior in order to maximize their bonus. You get what you measure.
            • ck425 11y ago
              Unfortunately not an option in that case as the issue was tickets not gotten closed full stop due to a long process to complete them after my input.
            • marktangotango 11y ago
              >> they will turn into Einstein overnight Coming back to read this thread and found this gem, perfect example of why I wade threw all the detritus as above. Thanks!
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • Cthulhu_ 11y ago
    The problem is that any nontrivial savings or profit is almost never done by one person or can be traced back to one person or one job; in established companies it's a large team of management, developers, testers, etc which all work together to create value. You could argue that you can pinpoint it in a startup, but that's why a lot give shares to its employees.
    • LoSboccacc 11y ago
      true, but team efforts can still trickle down and makes an easier framework where to bolt on individual contributions
  • Tiquor 11y ago
    I've worked in multiple fortune 500 companies and startups at the entry and now management level and been involved in Web Development for 20 years. I've never seen a LOC report except when we run some games with the other devs to see # of changes in GIT or other source control.
    • dreamfactory2 11y ago
      Big SI offshore dev operations sometimes use LOC still. (This is a part of why corporate enterprise software is so poor.)
    • ones_and_zeros 11y ago
      Can you tell me which companies you've worked for that determined developer value by the effect on the bottom line? Because I'd like to send them my resume.
      • OpenDrapery 11y ago
        Yes. Just because we all recognize that LOC is a shitty metric, doesn't mean that the industry has figured out what a good metric is. Measuring developer productivity and impact remains an unsolved problem. It still amounts to gut feel, and mostly whether or not your manager likes you or not, i.e. how much of a thorn you are to him/her.
      • nfc 11y ago
        If you agree with not getting paid while you have no effect on the bottom line I'm hiring ;)
    • vonmoltke 11y ago
      Come work in government contracting.
    • protomyth 11y ago
      Steve Ballmer at the 20:03 mark of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqFYsvxHZOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqFYsvxHZOs describes it as an IBM religion which he is pretty critical of.
  • Moru 11y ago
    I have seen this in the contract in some industries in Sweden. The people that has an optimization idea that saves the company money gets a percentage of what the company earns on the optimization the first five years or similar. Have also seen a few court cases where the company didn't pay out but was forced to pay :-)
    • mstade 11y ago
      I wonder how well those bonuses are received when the payee realizes the tax hike on anything about 36k SEK / month, or whatever the limit is these days. Sweden's tax system isn't very bonus friendly, so unless the bonus is so significant that it's worth the tax cost it's just not that great an incentive. For example, a 10k SEK isn't that meaningful a bonus, since anything above the 432k SEK / year is taxed at ~50% – unless you're ok with that you'd probably want to look into other options.
    • walshemj 11y ago
      Lol I could have retired if I had had that in my contract at BT or Reed Elsevier.
    • paulddraper 11y ago
      Really, a lawsuit? If that's not discouragement from listening to employee suggestions, I don't know what is.
  • awjr 11y ago
    I left a company because the code I'd written generated 600k in extra revenue (it hooked up their sales system to Amazon) and got a 2% pay rise "just like everyone else". When it came to the review, I did ask, what more I could have done to get recognised.
    • dreamfactory2 11y ago
      only way around this is to not be an employee
    • rebootthesystem 11y ago
      Wrong way to look at it. Start a company and gain an understanding of what it will take for you to be in a position to have someone write some code that increases your sales. Infrastructure, capital, product, systems, risk, positioning, reputation, marketing, etc. perhaps then you will understand. I had a sales guy once tell me, as we got a new hardware product ready for manufacturing, that we'd figure out how to split the profits once we started shipping. He felt entitled, even though he'd only been with us for six months. He conveniently ignored the fact that this product had been in development for nearly ten years during which time I invested millions into R&D, marketing and building an infrastructure to support the product internationally. I let him go a few weeks after that comment. Wrong attitude and a complete lack of context. I actually prefer to hire people who have had some entrepreneurial experience. They make far better employees. They are independent, hard working, no-bullshit on-mission because they get it. Pay them well and unleash them for great results.
      • skolor 11y ago
        The important part of the parent comment was "just like everyone else". For people who are employees, not stakeholders, recognition for success is important and the parent clearly felt they were not being recognized relative to their peers for what they were doing.
      • lifeisstillgood 11y ago
        There are two areas I would look at here 1. How much independence did the OP show creating the Amazon hookup? Was it his/her baby? Did they push forgot to happen? Or were they just rotated onto the project and it came with the next item off the backlog? 2. Was the OP the only one to add value that year? Was the value they added more than others or about the same. Without these two it's hard to see if they should realise they are just an employee and have no leverage or if they did get shafted. I think we all need to have more P&L responsibility in our jobs - software is about creative capital and should be highly leveraged. Maybe we should all go back to the partnership model?
  • dfyafla 11y ago
    sadly it's precisely what business are not gonna doing. I've spent much of my career doing close to nothing, with pay increasing each year. Many businesses seem to recognize it and reward it. I've never had an employer who measured contributions by LoC (though unless you've proven yourself of course there is some measure of productivity, such as stories completed, etc. Everyone knows what everyone else did). As stated in the root of this thread, this article completely misses the point of the 10x engineer, to the point of almost parody. The 10x engineer is the one who builds the tiny core of an app that makes everything else easily possible. Or who moves the whole team from one derlict, no longer useful technology to another. And so on. It has never, ever, been "the guy who spits out 10x the lines of code".
  • ryandrake 11y ago
    I'd be totally OK with a "lines of code" metric. If that was what my raise is going to be based on, let's do it! At least it's a metric and I know about it! I've worked at my fair share of companies, and not one of them based raises/bonuses (for engineers) on any kind of quantifiable metric or KPI. It basically always comes down to whether your boss likes you, or how much self-promotion you're doing, or what phase the moon is currently in, or some other wizardry. It's never a concrete metric that you can track your progress against throughout the year and know if you're going to succeed or not. One of the questions I ask in every interview is: Is my compensation entirely dependent on my job performance, and if so, what metrics are used to evaluate my performance. For some reason, nobody seems to have a good answer for that seemingly simple question. Sometimes they'll say "yea it's performance based", but when you press for what they're measuring, you won't get any information. So I'll take the job, and a year later annual review time comes, and lo and behold, it's "Here's your [good|bad|neutral] (it doesn't matter) performance review and your 1.5% cost-of-living increase!" Very demoralizing. Show me a place with clear, transparent, quantifiable performance metrics, and I'll beat a path to your door.
    • jdmichal 11y ago
      This, to me, is a common fairy tale technical people like to tell themselves to justify not getting involved in the social connections (aka politics) necessary to be fully successful. It doesn't matter what metrics you choose, because they will all be gamed. Just like the politics is gamed. And no matter what game is picked, certain people will just not like playing it, and will bemoan the choice and why couldn't they have picked X, some other random metric that will also be gamed. But at least they like that game so they'll play along and possibly even excel.
• patmcguire 11y ago
  There's this one, where instead of spending six months writing floating point in software he should have insisted on FPU on the chip. http://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html http://yosefk.com/blog/10x-more-selective.html