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With developers, incentive misalignment is just insane at all levels. - There is bias towards rewarding more lines of code or more code commits (which is often

With developers, incentive misalignment is just insane at all levels. - There is bias towards rewarding more lines of code or more code commits (which is often the exact opposite of what characterizes good software design). - There is bias towards rewarding speed of initial implementation (which often goes against medium-term and long term maintainability and ability to handle requirement changes which is usually far more important). The costs of this tends to fall on other developers who come in later and act as scapegoats for the 'apparent 10x developer'. - The industry keeps dismantling narratives which would otherwise help to reward talent. For example, many companies dismiss the idea of a '10x developer' - Probably because they are aware of the previous point about the fast developer who cuts corners and creates technical debt for others. 10x developers do exist, but they're not what most people expect because paradoxically, they may be slow coders when it comes to LOC metrics and speed of implementation for new features; their code really only shines in the medium and long run and it improves the productivity of their colleagues too so it's hard to properly allocate credit to 10x devs and they only really matter on greenfield projects.

zerbinxx 3y ago
Mega agree with this. It was really bad for my personal/career growth to get a ton of praise for doing things fast: granted, a lot of people doing the praising had precious little experience in tech themselves. I probably have 2-3 whole dead years where I could have been learning/improving a lot more but got put in “10x developer” expectation projects where I’d churn something out, get a big shiny star sticker for it, and then 2 years later it would be abandoned because there was no incentive for anyone but me to maintain it, and who would want to because it was shitty code with hacks and tech-debt, and anything that isn’t writing a fucking mountain of new garbage code gets in the way of shiny star collection.
- testacct22 3y ago
  > but got put in “10x developer” expectation projects where I’d churn something out, get a big shiny star sticker for it, and then 2 years later it would be abandoned I feel like I've fallen into this hole at my current gig, where I just churn shit out to solve a problem as quickly as possible I get away with it just bc general code quality was already not good to begin with Biggest mistake was going fast the first time, now I'm getting assigned way more shit Word of advice to readers: don't make the same mistake I made. You'll just get taken advantage of

zerbinxx 3y ago

Mega agree with this. It was really bad for my personal/career growth to get a ton of praise for doing things fast: granted, a lot of people doing the praising had precious little experience in tech themselves. I probably have 2-3 whole dead years where I could have been learning/improving a lot more but got put in “10x developer” expectation projects where I’d churn something out, get a big shiny star sticker for it, and then 2 years later it would be abandoned because there was no incentive for anyone but me to maintain it, and who would want to because it was shitty code with hacks and tech-debt, and anything that isn’t writing a fucking mountain of new garbage code gets in the way of shiny star collection.

testacct22 3y ago
> but got put in “10x developer” expectation projects where I’d churn something out, get a big shiny star sticker for it, and then 2 years later it would be abandoned I feel like I've fallen into this hole at my current gig, where I just churn shit out to solve a problem as quickly as possible I get away with it just bc general code quality was already not good to begin with Biggest mistake was going fast the first time, now I'm getting assigned way more shit Word of advice to readers: don't make the same mistake I made. You'll just get taken advantage of