3 ms·
> Imo great engineers produce a lot of good to great quality work fast Sounds awfully like the Myth of the 10x Engineer.
by alacombe 6y ago
> Imo great engineers produce a lot of good to great quality work fast
Sounds awfully like the Myth of the 10x Engineer.
- jackblemming 6y agoNot quite that high, but you'd be silly to believe there's no difference in speed at all.
- abiogenesis 6y agoIt can be that high. It's not the number of lines of code produced but the value/utility created. A great engineer can actually make the same product in X days where it takes an average developer 10X days to come up with the same. The better engineer might (and in most cases, would) have written less code.
- jackblemming 6y agoYes it can be that high depending on _how you're measuring_. I think this is why the myth has gone on for a long time. It also greatly depends on who you're comparing. Are you comparing Peter Norvig to a 1st year undergraduate, or someone on Peter's team who has around the same experience and skillset? But I don't want to derail the thread ;)
- abiogenesis 6y agoFair enough, but the problem is you can't always find a team full of people "who has around the same experience and skillset as Peter Norvig". That's basically what "The Mythical Man-Month" (the origin of the 10x developer) says: "Always recruit star programmers if you can, but most of the time you can't. Therefore learn how to best utilise the average ones."
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoIndeed, "a lot of good to great quality work fast" smells a bit of "SLOC per day" count. "SLOC per day" is the opposite of productivity: terrible developers can produce tons of bloated and unnecessary code.
- suyash 6y ago+1 - Lines of Code mean very little, I'd rather see the impact that work produces.