4 ms·

Presumably you're spending your free time following your interests and passions, which have some overlap with your work. Sounds like she follows the needs of h

Presumably you're spending your free time following your interests and passions, which have some overlap with your work. Sounds like she follows the needs of her job. The tangential, part-overlap enthusiast is always going to get toasted by the person going full on what's needed.

noir_lord 8y ago
It might well be that, I've run into a few people with the ability to ruthlessly focus on the problem at hand often by reframing the problem in a way that people didn't expect. A couple of them where so far ahead of me it was like teaming up with a different species. I don't buy the 10x developer stuff but I'd certainly put them in the 1.5x-2x category, We ended up working well together though I'd naturally take the "flesh this out, make it bullet proof, document it" side and they'd do the more creative part (it's not that I couldn't do it as well, it was just they'd do that in half the time). I learnt a lot working with them.
- snovv_crash 8y ago
  10x is real, and the way it is achieved is by making a key insight which results in requiring only 10% of the work to be done to get the required results. The actual work then gets done at the normal 1x rate. This of course is impossible at companies which don't allow the flexibility for these people to stretch their wings. A big part of increasing a company's productivity is giving everyone the possibility to do this so you can uncover those hidden 10x-ers and put them in architectural roles.
  - lucio 8y ago
    Sometimes is just making the mental work 10 times faster, e.g. evaluating the possibility space 10 times faster. There are people with brains running at 1 GHz and also people with brains running at 100 MHz. Although, having a faster brain is not good "per se"
    - snovv_crash 8y ago
      I'm not convinced that churning out the same solution 10x faster than average is possible. 3x yes. But the 10x comes from doing less work to achieve the same results.
      - lucio 8y ago
        if by "work" you mean writing code, that's a small part of what I'm referring to. 10x faster is the speed at which the possibility space is scanned.
- EliRivers 8y ago
  I don't buy the 10x developer stuff... 1.5x-2x category Closer to 2.5x, if you're comparing best to median. 10x is comparing best to worst, and that's very believable. A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

noir_lord 8y ago

It might well be that, I've run into a few people with the ability to ruthlessly focus on the problem at hand often by reframing the problem in a way that people didn't expect. A couple of them where so far ahead of me it was like teaming up with a different species. I don't buy the 10x developer stuff but I'd certainly put them in the 1.5x-2x category, We ended up working well together though I'd naturally take the "flesh this out, make it bullet proof, document it" side and they'd do the more creative part (it's not that I couldn't do it as well, it was just they'd do that in half the time). I learnt a lot working with them.

snovv_crash 8y ago
10x is real, and the way it is achieved is by making a key insight which results in requiring only 10% of the work to be done to get the required results. The actual work then gets done at the normal 1x rate. This of course is impossible at companies which don't allow the flexibility for these people to stretch their wings. A big part of increasing a company's productivity is giving everyone the possibility to do this so you can uncover those hidden 10x-ers and put them in architectural roles.
- lucio 8y ago
  Sometimes is just making the mental work 10 times faster, e.g. evaluating the possibility space 10 times faster. There are people with brains running at 1 GHz and also people with brains running at 100 MHz. Although, having a faster brain is not good "per se"
  - snovv_crash 8y ago
    I'm not convinced that churning out the same solution 10x faster than average is possible. 3x yes. But the 10x comes from doing less work to achieve the same results.
    - lucio 8y ago
      if by "work" you mean writing code, that's a small part of what I'm referring to. 10x faster is the speed at which the possibility space is scanned.
EliRivers 8y ago
I don't buy the 10x developer stuff... 1.5x-2x category Closer to 2.5x, if you're comparing best to median. 10x is comparing best to worst, and that's very believable. A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance. The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work. Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]