4 ms·

I'll chime in with the sister posts expressing vehement disagreement. I can tell you what "great" means to me, in 2(.5) very clear words. "You (fucking) Ship.

I'll chime in with the sister posts expressing vehement disagreement. I can tell you what "great" means to me, in 2(.5) very clear words. "You (fucking) Ship." To me a great dev has a track record of delivering the end result. A greater dev delivers the result faster, with less debt attached. One can fairly say that this is still subjective, but my criteria are _quite_ meaningful and even somewhat empirical/measurable, although it's admittedly hard to do in a short interview format. I certainly know a "Great dev" when I've met/worked with them, because they ship faster than I do, with less friction or need to revisit post-factum. Edit: Since half the responses seem to elide a very key part of my statement, let me echo: _debt matters_. Having someone who ships but burns your team down, not good. Someone who ships but leaves you with years of bugs or un-maintainable code, not good. As I'm sure we all know, you get optimizations against KPIS you measure, and if you don't measure "delivery" holistically, you'll absolutely get people who excel at one component while salting the fields.

grantwu 9y ago
Oh I guess we don't need maintenance then
- existencebox 9y ago
  I believe you're putting words in my mouth. A great dev can even be great within fixing problems/performing ops/maintenance, by my same qualification. _They ship fixes._ Perfection has very little to do with greatness. Aspiring for it might, but that's a second discussion about unrealistic goals and setting oneself up for disappointment.
  - Analemma_ 9y ago
    > I believe you're putting words in my mouth. You're the one who said you could describe "great" in two words that didn't include maintenance or quality. If it turns out those two words aren't enough, or need lots of asterisks and clarifying words, that's on you.
    - existencebox 9y ago
      I don't get the feeling that you and the parent are taking my comment in good faith; clarification is of course necessary if the parent response is effectively a non-sequitur/strawman vs what the other respondents took my meaning to be; but I'd rather not point fingers here, as that's not useful to a productive discussion. I chose not to use additional clarification because that unnecessarily constrains "shipping" to me. One can deliver value, and have a track record for delivering value, across a very wide set of variables, and I've found my heuristic to be far more elegant (if perhaps not precise enough to bear the rough seas of internet discourse) at mapping post-factum "Was this a successful business relationship" than a much more hair-splitting definition, as well as helping me keep personal biases out of my judgement re: someone else's success.
      - Analemma_ 9y ago
        > I don't get the feeling that you and the parent are taking my comment in good faith. I'm only playing by the rules you yourself set out. People in this thread were discussing how measuring "greatness" is subtle and very difficult, and then you came in asserting you could solve it with a snappy 2.5-word manta. If you're now claiming that additional clarification is needed, well, yeah, that's what everyone was saying to begin with.
        existencebox 9y ago
        The problem honestly seems like less of a debate about defining greatness and more about defining shipping, at this point. Maybe this is nitpicking, but I've had this conversation in person more times than I can count during loops, review cycles, and over beers, and I'm hard pressed to think of the last time I got such pushback against something that seemed pretty cut-and-dry; namely "did you get done what you needed to get done without undue pain and suffering." I'll openly concede that I very well could be in a "communication bubble" where words like shipping have loaded context. I'd still defend my point that if one chose the isomorphic terms for within their space, the "intent" of my message holds water as a useful heuristic, if a rather reductionist one. Tautologically, someone who I can trust to fulfill their role without "fires everywhere", two thumbs up in my book. That being said, I'm honestly blown away by the amount of downvotes I've been getting for what I typically saw as the pillar of "meritocracy", that you get your job done without burning down the house. I wish more of the opposition at least take the time to express _why_ as opposed to just burying this. At this point I feel like I'd do better to "Save my account" and stop commenting but alas this is a topic close to my heart.
- draw_down 9y ago
  Welcome to the tech industry!
TheHegemon 9y ago
I've met a lot of devs who could ship incredibly fast but were the worst developers I've ever worked with. I don't think is a great metric.
- existencebox 9y ago
  Trying to map your statement to my own experiences, coders with mojo who I still don't want to work with, the debt in those cases was often social, organizational, teamwise, etc. I'd be curious if you read my statement of "delivery with debt attached" to encompass those "soft" types of debt, whether you still have found outliers.
- perl4ever 9y ago
  There are things that you don't use as your single one dimensional metric, but they are still pre-requisites. "Getting things done" is always a pre-requisite. It's like salary from the other side; you don't (I don't) rate jobs based on ordering them all by salary, but it has to be a threshold (which may vary based on other factors).
sheepmullet 9y ago
> I can tell you what "great" means to me, in 2(.5) very clear words. "You (fucking) Ship." Our best dev hasn't shipped anything in the last 2 years. Yet he has objectively saved us ~$5 million over this period. Do your devs who fucking ship have yearly returns of >$2 million?
- existencebox 9y ago
  Are you sure we're not debating pedanticisms here? Clearly he delivered _something_ that let you derive those gains. Whether it was a new feature, an algo/data analysis that pointed out optimizations, whether it was 2 years training new employees who ended up being powerhouses, whether it was simply being a good lead for his team and running interference/making sure they're productive, to me those are all forms of delivering a result. Nostrademons put it better than my perhaps-too-succinct summary. You needed this dev to do something for you, and they accomplished it. They shipped. (This gets even more vague when you get higher level employees who set their own mission, but at the end of the day you're still judging them by some metric of long-term success. Do they have a track record of meeting that? Then yes, they're probably pretty solid by my standard.) And for the record, yes, my peers who "just ship" have regularly returned <large number> values here. I have the advantage of working for a bigCo so it's easy to generate outsized returns; so I'd say to not let the number distract from my point. I want devs I can rely on without babysitting, open and closed. Over the last 10-15 years, I've come to realize that nothing has come to mean as much to me as knowing I have a team can honestly _trust_ to get the job done. That's pretty exclusively why I define "Great" the way I do; nothing else feels quite as good to me nowadays as when a peer says "I got that handled" and I just know 100% it is. Give me a team made up of people like that and I'd tilt at any windmill :)
  - sheepmullet 9y ago
    > Are you sure we're not debating pedanticisms here? I'm not sure. Maybe. > Clearly he delivered _something_ that let you derive those gains. > to me those are all forms of delivering a result. But then by shipped you simply mean productive over the course of their employement - that's a pretty context sensitive metric to hire by. For example I've found through my own failures that being highly productive at a big corporate does not translate to being highly productive at a small startup. I mean I went from top 5% to middle of the pack.
stevenwoo 9y ago
This is one of the signals a large percentage of video game companies use. I'm not sure it's that great but here we are - at a lot of small shops this led to a Lord of the Flies mentality to mentions in the credits from what I was told. I can remember working on a shipped product that had a lot of bugs, it was one guy's several hundred thousand line DOS program in one c file that I had to fix bugs and add features to - the guy quit before stooping to fix bugs/add features requested by the customers. Did get to practice a lot of refactoring on that one.

grantwu 9y ago

Oh I guess we don't need maintenance then

existencebox 9y ago
I believe you're putting words in my mouth. A great dev can even be great within fixing problems/performing ops/maintenance, by my same qualification. _They ship fixes._ Perfection has very little to do with greatness. Aspiring for it might, but that's a second discussion about unrealistic goals and setting oneself up for disappointment.
- Analemma_ 9y ago
  > I believe you're putting words in my mouth. You're the one who said you could describe "great" in two words that didn't include maintenance or quality. If it turns out those two words aren't enough, or need lots of asterisks and clarifying words, that's on you.
  - existencebox 9y ago
    I don't get the feeling that you and the parent are taking my comment in good faith; clarification is of course necessary if the parent response is effectively a non-sequitur/strawman vs what the other respondents took my meaning to be; but I'd rather not point fingers here, as that's not useful to a productive discussion. I chose not to use additional clarification because that unnecessarily constrains "shipping" to me. One can deliver value, and have a track record for delivering value, across a very wide set of variables, and I've found my heuristic to be far more elegant (if perhaps not precise enough to bear the rough seas of internet discourse) at mapping post-factum "Was this a successful business relationship" than a much more hair-splitting definition, as well as helping me keep personal biases out of my judgement re: someone else's success.
    - Analemma_ 9y ago
      > I don't get the feeling that you and the parent are taking my comment in good faith. I'm only playing by the rules you yourself set out. People in this thread were discussing how measuring "greatness" is subtle and very difficult, and then you came in asserting you could solve it with a snappy 2.5-word manta. If you're now claiming that additional clarification is needed, well, yeah, that's what everyone was saying to begin with.
      - existencebox 9y ago
        The problem honestly seems like less of a debate about defining greatness and more about defining shipping, at this point. Maybe this is nitpicking, but I've had this conversation in person more times than I can count during loops, review cycles, and over beers, and I'm hard pressed to think of the last time I got such pushback against something that seemed pretty cut-and-dry; namely "did you get done what you needed to get done without undue pain and suffering." I'll openly concede that I very well could be in a "communication bubble" where words like shipping have loaded context. I'd still defend my point that if one chose the isomorphic terms for within their space, the "intent" of my message holds water as a useful heuristic, if a rather reductionist one. Tautologically, someone who I can trust to fulfill their role without "fires everywhere", two thumbs up in my book. That being said, I'm honestly blown away by the amount of downvotes I've been getting for what I typically saw as the pillar of "meritocracy", that you get your job done without burning down the house. I wish more of the opposition at least take the time to express _why_ as opposed to just burying this. At this point I feel like I'd do better to "Save my account" and stop commenting but alas this is a topic close to my heart.
draw_down 9y ago
Welcome to the tech industry!

TheHegemon 9y ago

I've met a lot of devs who could ship incredibly fast but were the worst developers I've ever worked with. I don't think is a great metric.

existencebox 9y ago
Trying to map your statement to my own experiences, coders with mojo who I still don't want to work with, the debt in those cases was often social, organizational, teamwise, etc. I'd be curious if you read my statement of "delivery with debt attached" to encompass those "soft" types of debt, whether you still have found outliers.
perl4ever 9y ago
There are things that you don't use as your single one dimensional metric, but they are still pre-requisites. "Getting things done" is always a pre-requisite. It's like salary from the other side; you don't (I don't) rate jobs based on ordering them all by salary, but it has to be a threshold (which may vary based on other factors).

sheepmullet 9y ago

> I can tell you what "great" means to me, in 2(.5) very clear words. "You (fucking) Ship." Our best dev hasn't shipped anything in the last 2 years. Yet he has objectively saved us ~$5 million over this period. Do your devs who fucking ship have yearly returns of >$2 million?

existencebox 9y ago
Are you sure we're not debating pedanticisms here? Clearly he delivered _something_ that let you derive those gains. Whether it was a new feature, an algo/data analysis that pointed out optimizations, whether it was 2 years training new employees who ended up being powerhouses, whether it was simply being a good lead for his team and running interference/making sure they're productive, to me those are all forms of delivering a result. Nostrademons put it better than my perhaps-too-succinct summary. You needed this dev to do something for you, and they accomplished it. They shipped. (This gets even more vague when you get higher level employees who set their own mission, but at the end of the day you're still judging them by some metric of long-term success. Do they have a track record of meeting that? Then yes, they're probably pretty solid by my standard.) And for the record, yes, my peers who "just ship" have regularly returned <large number> values here. I have the advantage of working for a bigCo so it's easy to generate outsized returns; so I'd say to not let the number distract from my point. I want devs I can rely on without babysitting, open and closed. Over the last 10-15 years, I've come to realize that nothing has come to mean as much to me as knowing I have a team can honestly _trust_ to get the job done. That's pretty exclusively why I define "Great" the way I do; nothing else feels quite as good to me nowadays as when a peer says "I got that handled" and I just know 100% it is. Give me a team made up of people like that and I'd tilt at any windmill :)
- sheepmullet 9y ago
  > Are you sure we're not debating pedanticisms here? I'm not sure. Maybe. > Clearly he delivered _something_ that let you derive those gains. > to me those are all forms of delivering a result. But then by shipped you simply mean productive over the course of their employement - that's a pretty context sensitive metric to hire by. For example I've found through my own failures that being highly productive at a big corporate does not translate to being highly productive at a small startup. I mean I went from top 5% to middle of the pack.

stevenwoo 9y ago

This is one of the signals a large percentage of video game companies use. I'm not sure it's that great but here we are - at a lot of small shops this led to a Lord of the Flies mentality to mentions in the credits from what I was told. I can remember working on a shipped product that had a lot of bugs, it was one guy's several hundred thousand line DOS program in one c file that I had to fix bugs and add features to - the guy quit before stooping to fix bugs/add features requested by the customers. Did get to practice a lot of refactoring on that one.