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There are statistical outliers in every single thing that has a big enough amount of samples and that it is possible for there to be statistical outliers. Mayb
by Dudeman112 5y ago
There are statistical outliers in every single thing that has a big enough amount of samples and that it is possible for there to be statistical outliers.
Maybe you attract those like flies are attracted to honey, but pointing out that an Einstein existed isn't really helpful for approximately all teams of physicists out there, minus one or two teams
I'm not even saying there isn't a huge quality variance in the regular pool of programmers, mind you. Just that pointing out the existence of bad motherfuckers in a population of a few million people shouldn't come as a surprise.
- varjag 5y agoThe proverbial '10x developer' is by definition an outlier tho yet people never stop arguing they don't exist.
- Dudeman112 5y agoI'd wager that has something to do with jumping the shark. People feel the need to chat about 10x developers when they don't even agree what a 1x developer is, and when they do present a definition, that definition is a function of (company, team, project, existing code base) which means there are more possible instances of 1x developers than the amount of developers who have ever lived. Everyone is better off if they just ditch the "10x" which has connotations that programming nerds will latch on to and just use "highly performant dudes".
- kragen 5y agoNo, in the studies in Sackman, Erikson, and Grant's 01968 paper (10.1145/362851.362858), which is the origin of the 10x-developer idea, there were only 12 and 9 programmers, respectively. In both studies the standard deviations were comparable to the means. That means 10x developers were a substantial part of the population, and the rest of the population also has very high variance; it isn't just a question of a few outliers. Jeff Dean is probably legitimately an outlier, though.
- kragen 5y agoThe average person is about 2 meters tall, weighs about 100 kg, can run about 10 kilometers per hour, lives about 70 years, and can shovel about 60 tons of coal in a day (without power tools). If you took a sample of a few million people, it should very definitely come as a surprise to find that it included "10x" people: people who were 20 meters tall, people who weighed 1000 kg, people who could run 100 kilometers per hour, people who lived 700 years, or people who could shovel 600 tons of coal a day. It should come as even more of a surprise to find "Jeff Dean" people who were 2 kilometers tall, or who weighed 100 tonnes, or who could run 10,000 km per hour, or who lived 70,000 years, or who could shovel 60,000 tonnes of coal in a day. Your comments about how physicists do physics are equally wrongheaded. Physics isn't any more a matter of shoveling coal than programming is, probably less so.
- Dudeman112 5y agoWhat made you think I think physics or programming is analogue to easily quantifiable manual labour? >It should come as even more of a surprise to find "Jeff Dean" To find them, yes. To point out that they exist and the likely that you'll work with them is statistically insignificant? No. The thing with intellectual labour is that some insights have immeasurable value. Some statistical outliers have such humongous intellectual capabilities that it's ridiculous how often they'll have great insights. Of course, that won't stop people from trying to attach some numbers to it, even if their numbers are epistemologically shit.
- kragen 5y agoNone of that makes any sense.
- Dudeman112 5y agoI would be happy to explain myself better :(