3 ms·

There is plenty of room for excellence in the humble day-to-day glue programming this post talks about. There are arguably better and worse glue programmers. I

There is plenty of room for excellence in the humble day-to-day glue programming this post talks about. There are arguably better and worse glue programmers. I have gotten better at doing the kind of work the post describes. I also think macho bullshit posted by VCs talking about "losers", "10x engineers", and "shape manipulators" who haven't written production code in decades if they ever did and have never written the kind of code I write is bullshit.

kbenson 5y ago
I'm not sure I've ever heard of a "shape manipulator" before, and I'm at such a loss as to what it could be that Google isn't super useful without additional context to lean on. The only thing I saw that might fit would be NumPy arrary shape manipulation. Anyone care to expand on what a shape manipulator is and where that came from?
- joliu 5y ago
  Shape Rotator. That is the meme.
- Firmwarrior 5y ago
  It's a meme that says some people are better at visualizing and mentally manipulating 3D images in their heads, and it implies that those people can use the same brain hardware to accomplish amazing feats of engineering I dunno if there's any truth to it at all.. I think most of programming is less of an inspired act of genius and more of a tradeskill like plumbing or roofing. I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance.
  - marginalia_nu 5y ago
    > I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance. Part of this may just be how we work in teams, versus in isolation. Like I built an Internet search engine alone, as a hobby, in less than a year. If I was a member of a team of 10 people tasked with building a search engine in a year, I'm not sure we'd be able to complete on time following standard software engineering practices. So much time is lost iterating on designs and pair programming and having daily standups and looking at burndown charts and coming up with goals and debating the definition-of-done for each task and having meetings with stakeholders and preparing/having demos and drinking coffee and iterating on API interfaces and discussing code standards and so on. While sure, that makes me 10x more effective than that team, but that is a hypothetical team including myself. In reality, I have a modicum of talent that is magnified with an extremely effective way of producing code quickly. To be very clear: I'm not saying all these things aren't there for a reason, it is only when myopically focusing on shipping code that I appear like a miracle that is 10x faster than myself.
- robocat 5y ago
  shape rotator (also numbercel) - STEM type person - engineer stereotype good at visualisation (can pass minds-eye shape rotation intelligence tests). wordcel - stereotyped humanities or liberal arts person (or sales?) - word with suffix of cel (meme templated from incel etcetera but without that original meaning). https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato... https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-definition https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-defi...

kbenson 5y ago

I'm not sure I've ever heard of a "shape manipulator" before, and I'm at such a loss as to what it could be that Google isn't super useful without additional context to lean on. The only thing I saw that might fit would be NumPy arrary shape manipulation. Anyone care to expand on what a shape manipulator is and where that came from?

joliu 5y ago
Shape Rotator. That is the meme.
Firmwarrior 5y ago
It's a meme that says some people are better at visualizing and mentally manipulating 3D images in their heads, and it implies that those people can use the same brain hardware to accomplish amazing feats of engineering I dunno if there's any truth to it at all.. I think most of programming is less of an inspired act of genius and more of a tradeskill like plumbing or roofing. I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance.
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  > I'm pretty sure there are tasks out there that I could get done in a month even though they'd take a team of 10 people 10 months to do, but if I trained those same people they could probably come close to my performance. Part of this may just be how we work in teams, versus in isolation. Like I built an Internet search engine alone, as a hobby, in less than a year. If I was a member of a team of 10 people tasked with building a search engine in a year, I'm not sure we'd be able to complete on time following standard software engineering practices. So much time is lost iterating on designs and pair programming and having daily standups and looking at burndown charts and coming up with goals and debating the definition-of-done for each task and having meetings with stakeholders and preparing/having demos and drinking coffee and iterating on API interfaces and discussing code standards and so on. While sure, that makes me 10x more effective than that team, but that is a hypothetical team including myself. In reality, I have a modicum of talent that is magnified with an extremely effective way of producing code quickly. To be very clear: I'm not saying all these things aren't there for a reason, it is only when myopically focusing on shipping code that I appear like a miracle that is 10x faster than myself.
robocat 5y ago
shape rotator (also numbercel) - STEM type person - engineer stereotype good at visualisation (can pass minds-eye shape rotation intelligence tests). wordcel - stereotyped humanities or liberal arts person (or sales?) - word with suffix of cel (meme templated from incel etcetera but without that original meaning). https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotator-mathcel https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/wordcel-shape-rotato... https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-definition https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/wordcels-numbercels-defi...