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Loved this part and thought it was hysterical - > Since my team had all interned at Jane Street the other language we considered using was OCaml, we decided on

Loved this part and thought it was hysterical - > Since my team had all interned at Jane Street the other language we considered using was OCaml, we decided on Rust but I was curious about how OCaml might have turned out so I talked to someone else I knew had interned at Jane Street and they indeed did their compiler in OCaml with two other former Jane Street interns. Relatedly this is why I get annoyed at people that don’t believe 10x or Nx developers exist - they absolutely do!

dudul 7y ago
Can you expand a little? I fail to see the connection between the quote and your conclusion.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  Jane Street only interviews and hires really exceptional engineers. A team of exceptional engineers in a single CS class, even if it is at a school like Waterloo, would imply that the 10x phenomenon isn't a myth but a somewhat mundane reality in certain circles.
ncmncm 7y ago
In the 90's, the Swedish Ericsson and German Siemens companies participated in a joint (crash) project. Each sent 250 engineers. After six months, they delivered. A friend counted up lines of code written by each engineer, at the end. Fully half the code in the final product was written by one person: N lines by him, N lines by the other 499 people. He was a lead programmer, who issued two-week assignments to other engineers; if one wasn't done come Friday, he would do it himself on Saturday. He doesn't consider himself especially fast, because he knows someone else who codes ten times as fast, and wears out two keyboards per year. This project was also interesting because they took blood samples, by which they got objective measurements of stress. Everyone's stress level increased right up to the deadline -- except his. And their stress levels did not start falling until many months after.
- madez 7y ago
  I'd like to read up on this, so I'd be happy if you could provide sources.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    Sorry, personal communication.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Price's Law - that the square root of the number of people in an organization do half the work - predicts that about 22 people should have done half of it, regardless of anything about 10x engineers. It also predicts that the N lines by the remaining people would be half done by about 22 of them and half done by 4xx of them; I wonder if that pattern was seen? Even if the original engineer was 10x as productive, that would leave 12 people doing half of it, not 1. It makes me think that if the average team worked twenty days a month for six months the project should have been 60,000 units of goodness, and if he was as productive as all of them, 120,000 units of goodness. If, instead, he wrote rushed low-quality code, they spent a week trying to untangle and integrate with it, then he ignored their work and rewrote it himself, demoralizing the team and refusing to play nice with them, it might have reduced the overall units of goodness way below what it could have been. And at the same time he gets the boost of writing it all himself his way and not having to care about making it stable for others to work on, so he looks disproportionately better for that as well. What did the other team members say about it? What happened to the project after? > He was a lead programmer, who issued two-week assignments to other engineers You ought to expect a lead programmer to be better, otherwise why would they get and deserve that position? You'd also expect a leader to be way better than assigning work people can't complete, not working with them, not stopping doing that, then taking over from them. What would a 10x exceptional leader who wasn't a worker, get out of a team of 500 average workers?

dudul 7y ago

Can you expand a little? I fail to see the connection between the quote and your conclusion.

akhilcacharya 7y ago
Jane Street only interviews and hires really exceptional engineers. A team of exceptional engineers in a single CS class, even if it is at a school like Waterloo, would imply that the 10x phenomenon isn't a myth but a somewhat mundane reality in certain circles.

ncmncm 7y ago

In the 90's, the Swedish Ericsson and German Siemens companies participated in a joint (crash) project. Each sent 250 engineers. After six months, they delivered. A friend counted up lines of code written by each engineer, at the end. Fully half the code in the final product was written by one person: N lines by him, N lines by the other 499 people. He was a lead programmer, who issued two-week assignments to other engineers; if one wasn't done come Friday, he would do it himself on Saturday. He doesn't consider himself especially fast, because he knows someone else who codes ten times as fast, and wears out two keyboards per year. This project was also interesting because they took blood samples, by which they got objective measurements of stress. Everyone's stress level increased right up to the deadline -- except his. And their stress levels did not start falling until many months after.

madez 7y ago
I'd like to read up on this, so I'd be happy if you could provide sources.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Sorry, personal communication.
jodrellblank 7y ago
Price's Law - that the square root of the number of people in an organization do half the work - predicts that about 22 people should have done half of it, regardless of anything about 10x engineers. It also predicts that the N lines by the remaining people would be half done by about 22 of them and half done by 4xx of them; I wonder if that pattern was seen? Even if the original engineer was 10x as productive, that would leave 12 people doing half of it, not 1. It makes me think that if the average team worked twenty days a month for six months the project should have been 60,000 units of goodness, and if he was as productive as all of them, 120,000 units of goodness. If, instead, he wrote rushed low-quality code, they spent a week trying to untangle and integrate with it, then he ignored their work and rewrote it himself, demoralizing the team and refusing to play nice with them, it might have reduced the overall units of goodness way below what it could have been. And at the same time he gets the boost of writing it all himself his way and not having to care about making it stable for others to work on, so he looks disproportionately better for that as well. What did the other team members say about it? What happened to the project after? > He was a lead programmer, who issued two-week assignments to other engineers You ought to expect a lead programmer to be better, otherwise why would they get and deserve that position? You'd also expect a leader to be way better than assigning work people can't complete, not working with them, not stopping doing that, then taking over from them. What would a 10x exceptional leader who wasn't a worker, get out of a team of 500 average workers?