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So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. Take the POS example. You're helping real

So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. Take the POS example. You're helping real people be more efficent, and you've litterally got better things to do than be a software purist ( no offense, have same problem ). People are relying on you. Meanwhile, serving the hospitality environment where multiple devices might be ran around a restaurant, and end up down a beer garden, all the whilst being expected to have every order on every device, because a table may call a wandering staffer, whilst having spotty AF network connectivity, processing trillion of transactions a year. Suddenly you have a real life use case where your DS&A knowledge is useful, a real reason to be efficent on the wire, the device, and the server, and improvements in architecture can remove bad states, bugs, and improve the lives and fortunes of real people. If being a 1% dev means profiling people and serving them ads, or writing pure code that nobody uses, then I'm quite happy in the 99%. Disclaimer: I'm a CTO of one of those POS startups. :)

jl6 5y ago
99% programmers need to pick up stuff, carry stuff, and throw stuff. 1% programmers are like circus jugglers - the same basic thing, but taken to a breathtaking extreme. They are skilful and impressive, but the scenarios where you need them are rare.
- Jensson 5y ago
  Those scenarios are rare if you have gotten used to what 99% can and can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing. Of course your competitors will do the same, you can't scale up an organization of top 1% professionals, so you don't really need them to compete in the market but you do really need them to solve a lot of problems. Just that today those problems aren't being solved in most places.
  - Dudeman112 5y ago
    >can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing Is that assessment accurate to reality? How would we know if the bottleneck for most business is "my employees aren't good enough to solve hard technical problems" or "most of our problems aren't hard technical problems"?
  - urthor 5y ago
    As one of the 99%. What are some of these problems exactly, that me and my extremely large toolkit of cool things I can curl from Github can't solve? Because I'm not a genius. But I'm real good at stapling together some useful crap.
    - oblio 5y ago
      You'll probably get a long list of stuff that includes things such as: OSes, compilers, game engines, distributed process frameworks, etc. Which as you'll note, are infrastructure things. Things which need 1/100th the manpower (at most!) to maintain. While everyone else is busy churning user-facing apps. You don't need to do that stuff, you career can be extremely successful without ever going near those things, especially if you are not interested in them.
      - urthor 5y ago
        That's the thing, I think a lot of those are, if not solved, problems where there's a lot of really well established good solutions that exist. I could, I guess, tackle them. But I've got an appreciation that what's already there is already pretty great. I suppose that's maybe the answer to my question. You don't need to be 1% to solve a problem as well as the solutions that already exist. You need to be the 1% to improve on the current state of the art. Which in a commercial environment, as you can imagine, is exceptionally rare. They are more about finding unsolved problems than iterating on problems already solved by FOSS.
        oblio 5y ago
        For various reasons (usually control, but frequently spun as "needing to be cutting edge"), some groups or companies do reinvent those wheels and in some lucky cases we get progress. For example Google has recreated several of those things and especially in the data storage field they've probably moved things forward. But in general I agree with you, the crushing majority of developers out there won't work on those things and won't ever even need to. It's also a source of not always deserved elitism from the people that work on those things, and I definitely dislike that (there's enough elitism in this field, as-is).
ejb999 5y ago
>>So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. I didn't read the article the same way as many here did - my take was that he was talking about the 99% of developers who don't need the newest/leading-edge technologies because they are not solving for those problems (massive scaling for example), because the business they are working with/for simply will never need to worrying about that. I didn't take it to mean that some of those same developers solving those '99%' problems, are not individually top 1% developers - you can be a top 1% developer imo, and still used tried-and-tested technology that is consider 'old' or boring. Using the right tools, does not make one a top 1% developer; a top 1% developer will shine no matter what tools that need to use; they just use them better.

jl6 5y ago

99% programmers need to pick up stuff, carry stuff, and throw stuff. 1% programmers are like circus jugglers - the same basic thing, but taken to a breathtaking extreme. They are skilful and impressive, but the scenarios where you need them are rare.

Jensson 5y ago
Those scenarios are rare if you have gotten used to what 99% can and can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing. Of course your competitors will do the same, you can't scale up an organization of top 1% professionals, so you don't really need them to compete in the market but you do really need them to solve a lot of problems. Just that today those problems aren't being solved in most places.
- Dudeman112 5y ago
  >can't do and therefore just dismiss many solutions without thinking since you know the 99% can't do those thing Is that assessment accurate to reality? How would we know if the bottleneck for most business is "my employees aren't good enough to solve hard technical problems" or "most of our problems aren't hard technical problems"?
- urthor 5y ago
  As one of the 99%. What are some of these problems exactly, that me and my extremely large toolkit of cool things I can curl from Github can't solve? Because I'm not a genius. But I'm real good at stapling together some useful crap.
  - oblio 5y ago
    You'll probably get a long list of stuff that includes things such as: OSes, compilers, game engines, distributed process frameworks, etc. Which as you'll note, are infrastructure things. Things which need 1/100th the manpower (at most!) to maintain. While everyone else is busy churning user-facing apps. You don't need to do that stuff, you career can be extremely successful without ever going near those things, especially if you are not interested in them.
    - urthor 5y ago
      That's the thing, I think a lot of those are, if not solved, problems where there's a lot of really well established good solutions that exist. I could, I guess, tackle them. But I've got an appreciation that what's already there is already pretty great. I suppose that's maybe the answer to my question. You don't need to be 1% to solve a problem as well as the solutions that already exist. You need to be the 1% to improve on the current state of the art. Which in a commercial environment, as you can imagine, is exceptionally rare. They are more about finding unsolved problems than iterating on problems already solved by FOSS.
      - oblio 5y ago
        For various reasons (usually control, but frequently spun as "needing to be cutting edge"), some groups or companies do reinvent those wheels and in some lucky cases we get progress. For example Google has recreated several of those things and especially in the data storage field they've probably moved things forward. But in general I agree with you, the crushing majority of developers out there won't work on those things and won't ever even need to. It's also a source of not always deserved elitism from the people that work on those things, and I definitely dislike that (there's enough elitism in this field, as-is).

ejb999 5y ago

>>So, the thing is, I'd argue a focus on outcome with good technical skills to deliver it, makes you the 1% developer. I didn't read the article the same way as many here did - my take was that he was talking about the 99% of developers who don't need the newest/leading-edge technologies because they are not solving for those problems (massive scaling for example), because the business they are working with/for simply will never need to worrying about that. I didn't take it to mean that some of those same developers solving those '99%' problems, are not individually top 1% developers - you can be a top 1% developer imo, and still used tried-and-tested technology that is consider 'old' or boring. Using the right tools, does not make one a top 1% developer; a top 1% developer will shine no matter what tools that need to use; they just use them better.