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> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineer
by vinhboy 8y ago
> Someone who can do that is ridiculous. Talk about 10x engineers. That's more like 1000x. And it's good, clean code too. Literally no number of median engineers can do that. You can give me a million median engineers and they would never be able to do that. They would just make a huge mess.
This is probably one of the most truest thing I've read about our profession.
Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else?
- jacquesm 8y agohttps://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/ http://norvig.com/ http://norvig.com/
- fossuser 8y agoJohn Carmack
- not_real_acct 8y agoMichael Abrash paved the way for Carmack. Carmack is great, no doubt, but Abrash wrote the book (literally.)
- fossuser 8y agoI think they both work together now at Oculus.
- not_real_acct 8y agoYep! IIRC, Carmack learned a lot from Abrash, and then eventually hired him at ID Software. They've been working together for ages.
- natmaka 8y agoThere is an interesting and quite surprising book about this (among other similar theses/memes/opinions/whatever) titled "The Leprechauns of Software Engineering" (by Laurent Bossavit).
- speps 8y agohttps://people.xiph.org/~jm/ https://people.xiph.org/~jm/
- langitbiru 8y agoSatoshi Nakamoto (but maybe it's more than one person), Vitalik Buterin, Yann LeCun, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean.
- ensiferum 8y agoHis claimed competency probably grows a bit every few years and on every telling of this legendary story. 10 years from now it was 100k lines over the weekend or whatever. Clean code too!
- mrfredward 8y agoHe didn't emphasize the number of lines written in that weekend, and that's important. The most productive programmers I've met don't talk about the number of lines, unless it is how many lines they eliminated. When they brag, it will be about finding a solution that is powerful and elegant, not how much they typed. From the article: "And [Bret Taylor] rewrote the entire thing, making it 10 times as fast and a third of the size."
- oblio 8y agoI haven't read that much about Woz, but from what I gather he was brilliant, but his code (or hardware) wasn't "clean". He did have great insights leading to performance, but some stuff sounds fairly ridiculous today, like the stuff he did for Apple II's color display: https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/mystery-house-part-1/ https://www.filfre.net/2011/10/mystery-house-part-1/ Basically: brilliant, but very quirky.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tinkerteller 8y ago(only including people who wrote massive amounts of important and complex code themselves and quite possibly dozen median engineers wouldn’t have cut it) John Carmack Dennis Ritchie Ken Thompson Bill Gates Donald Knuth Jeff Dean Brian Kernighan
- lallysingh 8y agoIt's a combination of finding someone really talented, putting them in an area where their talent gets well used, and giving them lots of freedom to implement as they wish.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoBeing there at the right time helps as well, there were lots of low hanging fruit waiting to be picked.
- tinkerteller 8y agoThis list is not about talent finders/leaders/managers. It's about people who wrote ton of code to accomplish something by themselves that would have been very very hard for a good manager to accomplish by simply lining up big team of median engineers.
- a7776f88862 8y agoI would strongly disagree on the Bill Gates part. The early Microsoft compilers (yes, Microsoft started out as a compiler company) were by all accounts not that great. The really successful and technically impressive Microsoft projects have always been acquisitions. The technically best (or the only decent, depending on who you talk to) Microsoft product is SQL Server, which started out as a Sybase fork.
- not_real_acct 8y agoAs I understand it, Microsoft's success is largely because they poached an operating system contract. Basically the CEO of their competition was on a two-week vacation and there was no way to get in contact with him. So the contract went to Microsoft by default. Then Microsoft purchased an existing operating system and hacked it for their client. And the rest is history.
- crdoconnor 8y agoDave Cutler. The NT/XP/etc. architecture basically stalled as soon as he left and future improvements were incremental. You can tell there wasn't a winer equivalent on the windows 95/98/ME teams
- sporro 8y agoI'm pretty sure Dave Cutler is still at Microsoft. Cloud stuff.
- crdoconnor 8y agoI meant when he left the team. But yea, now he's doing cloud stuff. I'm pretty sure it's no coincidence that that is now their best performing product line either. Satya can thank him for his promotion to CEO.
- hef19898 8y agoThe difference between quality and quantity. In professions that tend more towards art than science this more pronounced. There is only so much you can solve by throwing resources at it. On the other hand, if your problem is to simply produce more of something no 1000x genius will get you far enough. Farer than the mediocre resource, but even for these people a day has only 24 hours.
- vowelless 8y agoRich Hickey
- noblethrasher 8y agoDan Ingalls Ivan Sutherland L. Peter Deutsch
- sireat 8y agoBill Joy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy) is another super programmer with numerous crucial projects(vi, parts of BSD Unix, stuff at Sun, etc) under his belt. One of many Bill Joy legends: BBN had a big contract to implement TCP/IP, but their stuff didn't work, and grad student Joy's stuff worked. So they had this big meeting and this grad student in a T-shirt shows up, and they said, "How did you do this?" And Bill said, "It's very simple — you read the protocol and write the code"
- whatever_dude 8y ago"Anyone with ownership" comes to mind. When you have 10 people in a project there's way too much friction. Every decision is stalled, people code defensively rather than proactively. Everyone is trying so hard to get to the lowest common denominator that they can never do anything actually good. That's not to say that better or worse engineers exist. They do. But I feel like a team's context and environment has a much higher impact on the quality of the output. You take away people's autonomy, the result will undoubtedly be shit. You give people autonomy, you can get bombs but you can also get brilliance.
- riazrizvi 8y agoBracing for down votes but I think that’s garbage. Once the system has been precisely defined in code (even poorly, especially when poorly!), refactoring it is a much smaller task, it’s also a ‘smooth’ problem (there are no hidden problem mountains that sap your drive as you discover your expectations were way off week after week) because the problem is all there in front of you, in ascii. You are also motivated to look good because people do mis-compare these non-comparable tasks. I’ve refactored my own code, I’ve refactored others’ code, I’ve had my own code refactored. Every refactoring iteration is almost always a lot faster than the last, and there is almost always a benefit in performance, though maybe only iteration #2 provides a really big boost when #1 was a rush job. You just need to be a good engineer who knows how to write well organized, well patterned, and performant code. It’s important to remember that engineering, like design in general, is an activity done under time constraint, every iteration is an opportunity for more time, and it’s also a fresh break/perspective on the problem. I love refactoring code.
- gumoro 8y agoIt's not just about code. In any non-trivial system you have a bunch of components, and any minor occurrence of "bad design" that affects boundaries, protocols, configuration, deployment, persistence schema, upgrade procedures, etc, can lead to huge complications down the road if there's no one to catch this early. Mediocre engineers will only make it worse and worse, and you'll get something super complex that costs big bucks to maintain. If you have someone capable of detecting & fixing such bad patterns early enough, in extreme cases that person can be considered a 1000x engineer.
- rifung 8y agoI agree completely. Also I feel what usually happens is that requirements change over time, and things get repurposed as "hacks" because ain't nobody got time to rewrite the entire thing. But at some point the effort to rewrite is worth it and at that point even the same engineers who did the original implementation should be able to write a much cleaner and faster version. When I was new I thought I was so awesome when I saw how I could write better code than I read. It was only way later I realized people usually had good reasons for writing it that way originally but those reasons disappeared.
- olvo 8y ago> Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak comes to mind, who else? I don't think those are generally good examples of 10x engineers. Most people don't get to have a large impact by making the most of something specific. I think in the wild it is more as described in the article. That 10x engineers are people who raise the standard for whatever is in front of them and save themselves, and their companies, thousands and thousands of man hours by doing so. It is really really hard to be better at people at hard things, it is a lot easier to be better than people at things that are supposedly easy, but people consistently fail at.
- Aeolun 8y agoI don’t think this is true so much as a programmer on his own works about 5-20x as fast as a team hindered by procedure, CYA and communication at every step. The end result still depends on experience, but even the best programmers slow to a crawl when they work in an enterprise environment (obviously not always true, but as a general rule)
- not_real_acct 8y agoTen years ago, I moved to a state I'd always dreamed of living in, and I bought a home. My timing was atrocious; every single month my home was worth less and less and less. I absolutely bent over backwards to keep my job. Worked sixteen hour days, worked weekends. My employer kept trying to replace me, because my rate was fairly high. First they tried to hire three people in India to replace me, but a third of the Indians quit, a third were gobbled up by another team, leaving one Indian who wasn't that great. Then they brought in a couple of consultants. They basically phoned it in for a year, and were eventually sent back. I think the reason that I weathered all this is that I simply didn't have a Plan B. I couldn't fail, if I did, I'd lose my house. I was willing to do whatever it takes to stay employed, and though they kept trying to replace me, they couldn't find anyone that was that invested in succeeding. This isn't to say I was smart, or talented. But I was tenacious and I was relentless.
- tretiy3 8y agoAll the guys from "Coders at work" [1]: - Jamie Zawinski - Brad Fitzpatrick - Douglas Crockford - Brendan Eich - Joshua Bloch - Joe Armstrong - Symon Peyton Jones - Peter Norvig - Guy Steele - Dan Ingalls - L Peter Deutsch - Ken Thompson - Fran Allen - Bernie Cossel - Donald Knuth [1] https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Programming/dp/1430219483 https://www.amazon.com/Coders-Work-Reflections-Craft-Program...