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Because at scale small changes can save or make a company more money than an engineers salary. Simply making a process 2% more efficient can save hundreds of t

Because at scale small changes can save or make a company more money than an engineers salary. Simply making a process 2% more efficient can save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or increasing advertising conversions by 1%. etc etc.

bob1029 7y ago
Right, but system creation+enhancements can be made by a single engineer in a large % of those cases. Overwhelmingly so if you already have a working live system to start with and you are seeking incremental improvements (vs a full rewrite). There aren't many technical challenges I have encountered, when reduced to their smallest functional dimensions, that couldn't be fundamentally addressed by a single engineer. Obviously, efforts like writing an entire (practical) operating system are impossible for a single engineer to accomplish, but even then a single engineer could lead the entire effort or massive parts of the effort (e.g. the Linux kernel). Conversely, I have seen far too many cases of "too many chefs in the kitchen" when it comes to a software project. This is the end of the spectrum where you end up stuck on Docker with a stochastic and otherwise insane architecture that isn't even consistent within each product, much less across the entire organization.
- farisjarrah 7y ago
  Most of the time one competent 10x engineer could indeed build out all the special features that a company needs. The problem is that one person generally doesn't know all the best practices required of every problem domain, so they may implement things poorly. Furthermore, the one dev thing really doesn't scale up. As soon as your product gains any critical mass and you have an outage then the platform is hosed because no one knows how to fix anything except MAYBE that one engineer who implemented all the special features.
  - B_Throwaway 7y ago
    There are no systems running Windows 10X in production yet.
    - legostormtroopr 7y ago
      Its a shame this amazing reference is being downvoted. Hopefully Windows 10X puts an end to the "10x developer" meme.
    - dtparr 7y ago
      Can't tell if you're trolling, so in case you've confused others. http://svdictionary.com/words/10x-engineer http://svdictionary.com/words/10x-engineer
- nostrademons 7y ago
  The percentage of changes that actually improve things drops significantly as the company gets more optimized, so you need to try more things to have a good chance of actually getting one implemented. Say that a tweak to the page improves ad revenue by $50M. 98% of tweaks have neutral or negative effects. The expected value of the tweak is thus $1M, well over one engineer's salary. You need to have 50 of them going on in parallel to have a good chance of actually finding a successful tweak, though. (Well, technically about 150 to have a 95% confidence that at least one will prove useful, but there's also a good chance that more than one will be useful then.) That's what all the engineers are doing - independently implementing different changes and discarding 98% of the results. When I did this kind of work, the vast majority of engineering time was actually spent measuring the results. It was not unusual for the actual implementation work to be done in about 3 hours, but the experiment design, approval, configuration, logging, data-collection, and analysis to take 3 weeks. And that was with a fair amount of existing tooling for measurement & process.
tanilama 7y ago
But WeWork doesn't make any money. That is the problem. No matter how many smart engineers they hire, it is just adding additional cost, until they start to turn a profit. Majority of its business value goes to real estate owners.

bob1029 7y ago

Right, but system creation+enhancements can be made by a single engineer in a large % of those cases. Overwhelmingly so if you already have a working live system to start with and you are seeking incremental improvements (vs a full rewrite). There aren't many technical challenges I have encountered, when reduced to their smallest functional dimensions, that couldn't be fundamentally addressed by a single engineer. Obviously, efforts like writing an entire (practical) operating system are impossible for a single engineer to accomplish, but even then a single engineer could lead the entire effort or massive parts of the effort (e.g. the Linux kernel). Conversely, I have seen far too many cases of "too many chefs in the kitchen" when it comes to a software project. This is the end of the spectrum where you end up stuck on Docker with a stochastic and otherwise insane architecture that isn't even consistent within each product, much less across the entire organization.

farisjarrah 7y ago
Most of the time one competent 10x engineer could indeed build out all the special features that a company needs. The problem is that one person generally doesn't know all the best practices required of every problem domain, so they may implement things poorly. Furthermore, the one dev thing really doesn't scale up. As soon as your product gains any critical mass and you have an outage then the platform is hosed because no one knows how to fix anything except MAYBE that one engineer who implemented all the special features.
- B_Throwaway 7y ago
  There are no systems running Windows 10X in production yet.
  - legostormtroopr 7y ago
    Its a shame this amazing reference is being downvoted. Hopefully Windows 10X puts an end to the "10x developer" meme.
  - dtparr 7y ago
    Can't tell if you're trolling, so in case you've confused others. http://svdictionary.com/words/10x-engineer http://svdictionary.com/words/10x-engineer
nostrademons 7y ago
The percentage of changes that actually improve things drops significantly as the company gets more optimized, so you need to try more things to have a good chance of actually getting one implemented. Say that a tweak to the page improves ad revenue by $50M. 98% of tweaks have neutral or negative effects. The expected value of the tweak is thus $1M, well over one engineer's salary. You need to have 50 of them going on in parallel to have a good chance of actually finding a successful tweak, though. (Well, technically about 150 to have a 95% confidence that at least one will prove useful, but there's also a good chance that more than one will be useful then.) That's what all the engineers are doing - independently implementing different changes and discarding 98% of the results. When I did this kind of work, the vast majority of engineering time was actually spent measuring the results. It was not unusual for the actual implementation work to be done in about 3 hours, but the experiment design, approval, configuration, logging, data-collection, and analysis to take 3 weeks. And that was with a fair amount of existing tooling for measurement & process.

tanilama 7y ago

But WeWork doesn't make any money. That is the problem. No matter how many smart engineers they hire, it is just adding additional cost, until they start to turn a profit. Majority of its business value goes to real estate owners.