12 ms·

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing tha

I think the true 10x multiplier is not a technical skill at all. It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. It is enshrined in the concept of the MVP and the short iteration cycle. Quicky building something that does not solve a business problem is not productive. Work=force*displacement. No movement, no work. A closely related skill is the ability to cut through all the abstractions and interfaces to get to the root cause of what is broken or needs changed. A technical and organizational debt buster if you will.

noduerme 5y ago
This is the right answer. The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. In a sentence: Be able to visualize the problem in your head first. The actual code, if it's elegant and succinct, is incidental.
- rco8786 5y ago
  > The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. This seems antithetical to the post above yours. Or at least how I'm reading it. In bigger tech co's this looks a lot like massive design documents with a dozen reviewers, all giving enormous amounts of time and thought to the idea in the pursuit of "building it right". Design processes that can take weeks or months for what is otherwise an MVP.
  - hagridaaron91 5y ago
    I've been thinking about this idea a lot recently. I'm decently new to the big-tech-co space, but it does seem like a huge amount of resourcing goes into design and defense of projects. I wonder what y'all think about someone doing a timeboxed MVP (a sprint or less?) as a way of susing out design, and THEN getting reviewers/etc? Obviously you have to take security into large consideration when doing things like this - but this is what qa/sandbox environments are for.
    - cyberge99 5y ago
      A pot of big corps have Hackathon weeks for doing just this. A free-for-all to build something you want and that you think will be helpful to the org from your perspective.
      - rco8786 5y ago
        And as soon as those weeks are over everyone goes right back to their previously scheduled work.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Hell, wait till you find out how much time is wasted in Dev/Ops just changing the tooling every year or two, literally tearing down and rebuilding everything you already have in the name of staving off another couple years of technical debt. It's silly. I'm a bit of a rarity in the modern world (and here in the corporate space that is HN), in that I'm the sole programmer on a bunch of large software projects in production that I also maintain and sysadmin 24/7. The only meetings needed are to understand what the clients want and bitch at them that what they want makes no sense, until they start making sense, and then trust me to build it. If something comes up from a design perspective that I think could go one of several ways, I usually have that thought in the shower and mumble to myself for awhile before framing it in terms they would understand as a series of yes/no choices. This is generally way more efficient than hiring a team, and I know, because I've tried to hire teams to do it. There's a limit to what one coder like me can do, but it's a lot higher than what 4 people bickering can do. I'd say it's around what 8 bickering people can do. Design and defense of design, though, is not just about ego. Not if it's done properly. The best design/code people will come to you and say this is why this is the only way to do X and lay out the chain of logic that led them to that conclusion. That's not because they'll be personally hurt if you don't go that direction; it's that they're annoyed they'll have to do extra work to make an inferior product if you don't take their advice. Promote those people.
      - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
        What happens if you get hit by a bus or just want to take a vacation? I think this is more about your inability to work with other people than it is about you truly being a 4-8x coder.
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    I would say analysis paralysis: no. Strategic thinking/designing: yes.
    - lanstin 5y ago
      Take the time to distill it down to a powerful but small concept.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    The fact that launching any kind of work in production in a big organization makes it even more important to just focus on tiny changes (sometimes a few lines of code) with huge benefits. You can have bigger changes as proof of concept first, but select, properly design and launch the most important one.
- mertnesvat 5y ago
  Exactly I'm living proof that seniority comes with the ability to spend more time on problems to understand all the details before committing stuff which no idea how that works.
replyifuagree 5y ago
This. Which isn't to say that technical knowledge doesn't matter, it truly does. But, the primary problem in the industry right now is that the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused. The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  > The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier. How much of that waste would you attribute to 1x programmers and how much would you attribute to 0x managers?
  - nilsbunger 5y ago
    I would attribute most of it to poor customer development or product management. If you can’t find the demand for your product, it doesn’t matter how good the engineers or managers are. Failed projects are inevitable though, even if you do everything well. Good teams don’t look for people to blame, which results in no one sticking their neck out to advocate for stuff. Instead they look to learn from each experience and hone their processes.
  - replyifuagree 5y ago
    85% in favor of managers being the problem. I pulled that number from the Ford Motor Company turnaround where Deming said management was 85% of the problem. And I mean, who is responsible for curating those 1x engineers in the first place?
- kqr 5y ago
  And it's not only about features that go unused, but also features that are used but only in support of workflows that improves nobody's life. Or functionality that's used but is a wildly inefficient version of what could have been.
  - breckenedge 5y ago
    I’m curious about what you’d consider concrete examples of these inefficient solutions? The biggest thing that comes to my mind are SPAs that don’t need to be SPAs.
graycat 5y ago
Nice: Ah, FedEx founder F. Smith just booted himself out of the CEO slot and to just Chair of the BoD. At one time he was scared of the problem of scheduling the fleet. Yup, if describe the problem in complicated terms, then the scheduling problem gets wildly complicated, e.g., in NP Complete, etc. -- could have a big team working months on just the first version. But he needed answers right away and, to satisfy concerns of some investors on the Board, needed the answers also to apply to the whole, planned company (eventually it grew to something much bigger than the initial plans). I was in a meeting looking for a solution with several people, and it was all confused. Finally I just announced that I'd solve it. I was teaching computer science at Georgetown and had 6 weeks to go to the end of the semester. So, I wanted to be done in six weeks. How'd I do that? Sure, just concentrated on what the business actually needed and threw out the rest. So, in six weeks had the software putting out nice schedules. Our two representatives of BoD member General Dynamics and major investor evaluated the schedule and announced "It's a little tight in a few places but it's flyable.". The BoD was thrilled. At one point Smith stated that my work "solved the most important problem" facing the company. The 10X, maybe 1000X, difference was essentially just in delivering what the business needed and dropping the rest.
CalChris 5y ago
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. --Steve Covey
escapedmoose 5y ago
Absolutely this. I was a chronic procrastinator prone to intense anxiety and breakdowns just before deadlines. Then I took a really good ~3 hour course on time management, and it seriously changed my life. I can’t even describe how much more productive I am. It’s changed how I approach every task, professional and personal. I can’t even remember the last time I felt any sort of stress or anxiety about my to-do list. A big part of it is figuring out what doesn’t have to be done right now (“positive procrastination”). Edit to add that the course was “Time Management Fundamentals (2016)” by Dave Crenshaw. I completed it on LinkedIn learning. For those of you who’d like to give it a try, my advice is: do all the exercises. You won’t get the full value out of the course unless you actively incorporate the whole routine into your workflow. There’s a learning curve, but it’s absolutely worth it. Also be warned that the presenter’s personality is a little off-putting (to me, anyway), but he absolutely knows what he’s talking about, so listen to him.
- hyshai 5y ago
  Can you share this resource?
  - escapedmoose 5y ago
    Sorry about that—edited the original comment to include more info :)
- HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
  I'm also interested in what you learned and which class you took!
- tpoacher 5y ago
  What course was this, may I ask? I might watch it ... later :p
- bayofpigs 5y ago
  Curious what course you took and if you have time, a summary of the most valuable skills you learned?
- 5y ago
edelans 5y ago
Amen. or as Peter Drucker puts it (he is dubbed as "the founder of modern management" on Wikipedia) : "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker
- saidajigumi 5y ago
  And likewise, this theme shows up in Tom DeMarco's classic book Slack, which contrasts "efficiency" (the rate at which an organization is moveing towards some goal) vs "effectiveness" (the ability of the organization to choose and steer towards better goals). An important theme of the book is that an organization running full-tilt (maximum "efficiency") intrinsically reduces/eliminates its needed human "slack" to reflect and iterate towards the correct goals. DeMarco also digs into into the many organizational and management anti-patterns, with supporting research, that harm both effectiveness and efficiency (and just plain human well being...)
  - edelans 5y ago
    “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Damned, I had to search for the author and... it's also from Peter Drucker !
- rawgabbit 5y ago
  "If you don't know where you are going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there."
  - edelans 5y ago
    nice one as well !
bookreturn 5y ago
It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. "Landing the plane" as they sometimes say.

noduerme 5y ago

This is the right answer. The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. In a sentence: Be able to visualize the problem in your head first. The actual code, if it's elegant and succinct, is incidental.

rco8786 5y ago
> The proof is that a good coder spends about 10x as long thinking about it before actually committing any code. This seems antithetical to the post above yours. Or at least how I'm reading it. In bigger tech co's this looks a lot like massive design documents with a dozen reviewers, all giving enormous amounts of time and thought to the idea in the pursuit of "building it right". Design processes that can take weeks or months for what is otherwise an MVP.
- hagridaaron91 5y ago
  I've been thinking about this idea a lot recently. I'm decently new to the big-tech-co space, but it does seem like a huge amount of resourcing goes into design and defense of projects. I wonder what y'all think about someone doing a timeboxed MVP (a sprint or less?) as a way of susing out design, and THEN getting reviewers/etc? Obviously you have to take security into large consideration when doing things like this - but this is what qa/sandbox environments are for.
  - cyberge99 5y ago
    A pot of big corps have Hackathon weeks for doing just this. A free-for-all to build something you want and that you think will be helpful to the org from your perspective.
    - rco8786 5y ago
      And as soon as those weeks are over everyone goes right back to their previously scheduled work.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Hell, wait till you find out how much time is wasted in Dev/Ops just changing the tooling every year or two, literally tearing down and rebuilding everything you already have in the name of staving off another couple years of technical debt. It's silly. I'm a bit of a rarity in the modern world (and here in the corporate space that is HN), in that I'm the sole programmer on a bunch of large software projects in production that I also maintain and sysadmin 24/7. The only meetings needed are to understand what the clients want and bitch at them that what they want makes no sense, until they start making sense, and then trust me to build it. If something comes up from a design perspective that I think could go one of several ways, I usually have that thought in the shower and mumble to myself for awhile before framing it in terms they would understand as a series of yes/no choices. This is generally way more efficient than hiring a team, and I know, because I've tried to hire teams to do it. There's a limit to what one coder like me can do, but it's a lot higher than what 4 people bickering can do. I'd say it's around what 8 bickering people can do. Design and defense of design, though, is not just about ego. Not if it's done properly. The best design/code people will come to you and say this is why this is the only way to do X and lay out the chain of logic that led them to that conclusion. That's not because they'll be personally hurt if you don't go that direction; it's that they're annoyed they'll have to do extra work to make an inferior product if you don't take their advice. Promote those people.
    - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
      What happens if you get hit by a bus or just want to take a vacation? I think this is more about your inability to work with other people than it is about you truly being a 4-8x coder.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  I would say analysis paralysis: no. Strategic thinking/designing: yes.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    Take the time to distill it down to a powerful but small concept.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  The fact that launching any kind of work in production in a big organization makes it even more important to just focus on tiny changes (sometimes a few lines of code) with huge benefits. You can have bigger changes as proof of concept first, but select, properly design and launch the most important one.
mertnesvat 5y ago
Exactly I'm living proof that seniority comes with the ability to spend more time on problems to understand all the details before committing stuff which no idea how that works.

replyifuagree 5y ago

This. Which isn't to say that technical knowledge doesn't matter, it truly does. But, the primary problem in the industry right now is that the majority of finished code generated by professionals goes unused. The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
> The amount of waste is staggering. Working on the right thing is way more than a 10x multiplier. How much of that waste would you attribute to 1x programmers and how much would you attribute to 0x managers?
- nilsbunger 5y ago
  I would attribute most of it to poor customer development or product management. If you can’t find the demand for your product, it doesn’t matter how good the engineers or managers are. Failed projects are inevitable though, even if you do everything well. Good teams don’t look for people to blame, which results in no one sticking their neck out to advocate for stuff. Instead they look to learn from each experience and hone their processes.
- replyifuagree 5y ago
  85% in favor of managers being the problem. I pulled that number from the Ford Motor Company turnaround where Deming said management was 85% of the problem. And I mean, who is responsible for curating those 1x engineers in the first place?
kqr 5y ago
And it's not only about features that go unused, but also features that are used but only in support of workflows that improves nobody's life. Or functionality that's used but is a wildly inefficient version of what could have been.
- breckenedge 5y ago
  I’m curious about what you’d consider concrete examples of these inefficient solutions? The biggest thing that comes to my mind are SPAs that don’t need to be SPAs.

graycat 5y ago

Nice: Ah, FedEx founder F. Smith just booted himself out of the CEO slot and to just Chair of the BoD. At one time he was scared of the problem of scheduling the fleet. Yup, if describe the problem in complicated terms, then the scheduling problem gets wildly complicated, e.g., in NP Complete, etc. -- could have a big team working months on just the first version. But he needed answers right away and, to satisfy concerns of some investors on the Board, needed the answers also to apply to the whole, planned company (eventually it grew to something much bigger than the initial plans). I was in a meeting looking for a solution with several people, and it was all confused. Finally I just announced that I'd solve it. I was teaching computer science at Georgetown and had 6 weeks to go to the end of the semester. So, I wanted to be done in six weeks. How'd I do that? Sure, just concentrated on what the business actually needed and threw out the rest. So, in six weeks had the software putting out nice schedules. Our two representatives of BoD member General Dynamics and major investor evaluated the schedule and announced "It's a little tight in a few places but it's flyable.". The BoD was thrilled. At one point Smith stated that my work "solved the most important problem" facing the company. The 10X, maybe 1000X, difference was essentially just in delivering what the business needed and dropping the rest.

CalChris 5y ago

The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. --Steve Covey

escapedmoose 5y ago

Absolutely this. I was a chronic procrastinator prone to intense anxiety and breakdowns just before deadlines. Then I took a really good ~3 hour course on time management, and it seriously changed my life. I can’t even describe how much more productive I am. It’s changed how I approach every task, professional and personal. I can’t even remember the last time I felt any sort of stress or anxiety about my to-do list. A big part of it is figuring out what doesn’t have to be done right now (“positive procrastination”). Edit to add that the course was “Time Management Fundamentals (2016)” by Dave Crenshaw. I completed it on LinkedIn learning. For those of you who’d like to give it a try, my advice is: do all the exercises. You won’t get the full value out of the course unless you actively incorporate the whole routine into your workflow. There’s a learning curve, but it’s absolutely worth it. Also be warned that the presenter’s personality is a little off-putting (to me, anyway), but he absolutely knows what he’s talking about, so listen to him.

hyshai 5y ago
Can you share this resource?
- escapedmoose 5y ago
  Sorry about that—edited the original comment to include more info :)
HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
I'm also interested in what you learned and which class you took!
tpoacher 5y ago
What course was this, may I ask? I might watch it ... later :p
bayofpigs 5y ago
Curious what course you took and if you have time, a summary of the most valuable skills you learned?
5y ago

edelans 5y ago

Amen. or as Peter Drucker puts it (he is dubbed as "the founder of modern management" on Wikipedia) : "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker

saidajigumi 5y ago
And likewise, this theme shows up in Tom DeMarco's classic book Slack, which contrasts "efficiency" (the rate at which an organization is moveing towards some goal) vs "effectiveness" (the ability of the organization to choose and steer towards better goals). An important theme of the book is that an organization running full-tilt (maximum "efficiency") intrinsically reduces/eliminates its needed human "slack" to reflect and iterate towards the correct goals. DeMarco also digs into into the many organizational and management anti-patterns, with supporting research, that harm both effectiveness and efficiency (and just plain human well being...)
- edelans 5y ago
  “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Damned, I had to search for the author and... it's also from Peter Drucker !
rawgabbit 5y ago
"If you don't know where you are going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there."
- edelans 5y ago
  nice one as well !

bookreturn 5y ago

It is the ability to quickly cut through irrelevant tasks and actions to focus on the thing that will move the business goal forward fastest. "Landing the plane" as they sometimes say.