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Not to mention the sheer arrogance so many SV companies have thinking that what they are doing is so special it requires "10x" developers compared to every othe

Not to mention the sheer arrogance so many SV companies have thinking that what they are doing is so special it requires "10x" developers compared to every other company out there.

Guest42 6y ago
Agreed, it seems to me often that companies will have greater resume demands for lower levels than 90 percent of the people at the organization, many times for skills that aren’t relevant for projects or business goals, it doesn’t require a tier 1 PhD in order to rush through zen desk tickets
- burnte 6y ago
  Oh, it's just as bad at higher levels, despite the people there generally having even FEWER of the qualifications. I'm top level IT management with a tremendous amount of actual technical knowledge, and just getting to an interview is the hardest part. I've never taken an interview that didn't result in an offer, but getting to the interview with all the demands is insanely difficult. Usually the spots get filled through unofficial channels and the person they hire for the job is unfit, technically. Incredibly frustrating when you're good at what you do.
  - Guest42 6y ago
    I’m sorry to hear that. Every now and again I see a person gets hired that seems like a bad fit and have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope their attitude and ego don’t drive people away. It also seems that many people that are really good prefer to avoid promotions in order to have more stability and focus on their strengths. I have a family member who is a technical expert with 30 years experience who often gets mistreated by people with fluffed up resumes.
    - burnte 6y ago
      Yes, it's frustrating. At my previous long term job, I cut IT costs _dramatically_, increased reliability to levels management didn't think was possible (it was _REALLY_ bad before I arrived), and made IT much more responsive, proactive, and well liked by the employees. I left, and was replaced by a guy who on paper looked amazing, but in reality was a disaster. I was asked to come back 5 months later to consult to train him up a bit. he told me exactly how he got the job: he paid for LinkedIn connections (his recruiter told him over 500 is a magic number), paid for endorsements in LI, and flat out lied about his skills on the resume. And here I am trying to work hard like a schmuck.
wegs 6y ago
Well, the problem is in the Typical Man Month. 10x as many 1x developers will deliver a worse product on a longer schedule than 1x as many 10x developers. Even if you assume 150% developers at 300% the cost, it's worth it. The number of communications channels grows quadratically with the number of people in the org. You'll come out ahead at larger organization sizes. Fewer, higher-productivity people is a huge win in software with compounding effects. And the next problem is most markets in software are winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most. Being the runner-up to Netflix is not a fun spot to be. The place where 1x developers do well is routine work, especially on smaller projects. For example, in-house IT work at a bank, manufacturer, etc. tends to not have those same economies.
- bdavisx 6y ago
  I completely agree with your premise on the 10x developer in concept (although what 10x means is up for debate). I agree with the fact that a team of "good" developers will outperform a team of <good developers, by a huge amount, in many different ways - quality, features, ux, etc. The issue is, whiteboarding people on trivia programming problems doesn't determine if they are a 10x/good developer - it only determines if they understand the particular trivia they are asked.
  - kenhwang 6y ago
    The problem is having people conduct whiteboard interviews without actually understanding what the whiteboard interview is looking for. 10x engineers tend to be force multipliers not because of their technical skills, it's due to their excellent soft skills (communication/leadership). Because organizational communication problems increase cost exponentially, so decreasing communication overhead is far better returns than a slightly better technical implementation. So you have all these people running these interviews focusing on the problem being asked when in reality, the solution to the problem is mostly irrelevant.
  - wegs 6y ago
    Well, no. My experience is that the technical interview is a noisy fizz-buzz. Good developers need to know algorithms and data structures, and be able to write code. If they can't even do that, they're definitely NOT a 10x'er. If they can, the next part is fit. You need to get over both bars to be hired. All of this is incredibly noisy, so part of what happens is you have to set the bar high, since 37% of the people you interview will perform one std. div. above where they actually are, and 5% will perform 2 std. div. above where they actually are. Setting a high bar means you lose a lot of good people due to random error. But the costs of one bad hire are EXTREME compared to missing a few good hires. So it makes sense to do that. People take rejections personally, but in most interview processes, it's pretty random. You have a bar. You hire people who interview 1-2 std. div. above that bar. You might be perfectly qualified, and I won't hire you if you had a bad day (or even an average day). The risk is too high. If you're 1 std. div. above, I'm moderately confident you're qualified. If you're 2 std. div. above, I'm very confident. And having hired people, that's how it plays out: I mostly hire people who interviewed well, and their performance on a typical day is typically lower than at the interview (not always, but usually). Hiring is about finding and bringing in good people as efficiently as possible. I'd rather interview 20 people, hire two I'm confident are good (miss six qualified people among those 20 who had bad days), than I would bring in 10 people and hire two of them. And bad people still slip in. You just can't do that much in an 8 hour interview. For startups, I go for personal recs and github repos. Does that mean I miss people who aren't in my network, and who don't do open source? Of course. But that's okay. I still find enough really good people that way. (And yes, my network IS diverse, thank you very much). But big companies need standardized processes, or things get rife with discrimination, nepotism, and all sorts of other nastiness. That easy to avoid small-scale, but with 1000 employees, it takes one bad apple to land on front page NY Times.
triceratops 6y ago
Google and FB don't do technical interviews for internal transfers, so they insist on a uniform hiring bar. Netflix pays so much money they can demand whatever skills they want candidates to have. All 3 companies have interesting and difficult challenges.

Not to mention the sheer arrogance so many SV companies have thinking that what they are doing is so special it requires "10x" developers compared to every other company out there.

Guest42 6y ago

Agreed, it seems to me often that companies will have greater resume demands for lower levels than 90 percent of the people at the organization, many times for skills that aren’t relevant for projects or business goals, it doesn’t require a tier 1 PhD in order to rush through zen desk tickets

burnte 6y ago
Oh, it's just as bad at higher levels, despite the people there generally having even FEWER of the qualifications. I'm top level IT management with a tremendous amount of actual technical knowledge, and just getting to an interview is the hardest part. I've never taken an interview that didn't result in an offer, but getting to the interview with all the demands is insanely difficult. Usually the spots get filled through unofficial channels and the person they hire for the job is unfit, technically. Incredibly frustrating when you're good at what you do.
- Guest42 6y ago
  I’m sorry to hear that. Every now and again I see a person gets hired that seems like a bad fit and have no choice but to cross my fingers and hope their attitude and ego don’t drive people away. It also seems that many people that are really good prefer to avoid promotions in order to have more stability and focus on their strengths. I have a family member who is a technical expert with 30 years experience who often gets mistreated by people with fluffed up resumes.
  - burnte 6y ago
    Yes, it's frustrating. At my previous long term job, I cut IT costs _dramatically_, increased reliability to levels management didn't think was possible (it was _REALLY_ bad before I arrived), and made IT much more responsive, proactive, and well liked by the employees. I left, and was replaced by a guy who on paper looked amazing, but in reality was a disaster. I was asked to come back 5 months later to consult to train him up a bit. he told me exactly how he got the job: he paid for LinkedIn connections (his recruiter told him over 500 is a magic number), paid for endorsements in LI, and flat out lied about his skills on the resume. And here I am trying to work hard like a schmuck.

wegs 6y ago

Well, the problem is in the Typical Man Month. 10x as many 1x developers will deliver a worse product on a longer schedule than 1x as many 10x developers. Even if you assume 150% developers at 300% the cost, it's worth it. The number of communications channels grows quadratically with the number of people in the org. You'll come out ahead at larger organization sizes. Fewer, higher-productivity people is a huge win in software with compounding effects. And the next problem is most markets in software are winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most. Being the runner-up to Netflix is not a fun spot to be. The place where 1x developers do well is routine work, especially on smaller projects. For example, in-house IT work at a bank, manufacturer, etc. tends to not have those same economies.

bdavisx 6y ago
I completely agree with your premise on the 10x developer in concept (although what 10x means is up for debate). I agree with the fact that a team of "good" developers will outperform a team of <good developers, by a huge amount, in many different ways - quality, features, ux, etc. The issue is, whiteboarding people on trivia programming problems doesn't determine if they are a 10x/good developer - it only determines if they understand the particular trivia they are asked.
- kenhwang 6y ago
  The problem is having people conduct whiteboard interviews without actually understanding what the whiteboard interview is looking for. 10x engineers tend to be force multipliers not because of their technical skills, it's due to their excellent soft skills (communication/leadership). Because organizational communication problems increase cost exponentially, so decreasing communication overhead is far better returns than a slightly better technical implementation. So you have all these people running these interviews focusing on the problem being asked when in reality, the solution to the problem is mostly irrelevant.
- wegs 6y ago
  Well, no. My experience is that the technical interview is a noisy fizz-buzz. Good developers need to know algorithms and data structures, and be able to write code. If they can't even do that, they're definitely NOT a 10x'er. If they can, the next part is fit. You need to get over both bars to be hired. All of this is incredibly noisy, so part of what happens is you have to set the bar high, since 37% of the people you interview will perform one std. div. above where they actually are, and 5% will perform 2 std. div. above where they actually are. Setting a high bar means you lose a lot of good people due to random error. But the costs of one bad hire are EXTREME compared to missing a few good hires. So it makes sense to do that. People take rejections personally, but in most interview processes, it's pretty random. You have a bar. You hire people who interview 1-2 std. div. above that bar. You might be perfectly qualified, and I won't hire you if you had a bad day (or even an average day). The risk is too high. If you're 1 std. div. above, I'm moderately confident you're qualified. If you're 2 std. div. above, I'm very confident. And having hired people, that's how it plays out: I mostly hire people who interviewed well, and their performance on a typical day is typically lower than at the interview (not always, but usually). Hiring is about finding and bringing in good people as efficiently as possible. I'd rather interview 20 people, hire two I'm confident are good (miss six qualified people among those 20 who had bad days), than I would bring in 10 people and hire two of them. And bad people still slip in. You just can't do that much in an 8 hour interview. For startups, I go for personal recs and github repos. Does that mean I miss people who aren't in my network, and who don't do open source? Of course. But that's okay. I still find enough really good people that way. (And yes, my network IS diverse, thank you very much). But big companies need standardized processes, or things get rife with discrimination, nepotism, and all sorts of other nastiness. That easy to avoid small-scale, but with 1000 employees, it takes one bad apple to land on front page NY Times.

triceratops 6y ago

Google and FB don't do technical interviews for internal transfers, so they insist on a uniform hiring bar. Netflix pays so much money they can demand whatever skills they want candidates to have. All 3 companies have interesting and difficult challenges.