5 ms·

And yet 10x developers are a thing.

esafak 3y ago
Are they? How do you know they are not 9x or 11x? It is hard to say because the industry (and I live in Silicon Valley) has no idea how to measure productivity. And this is reflected in salaries. If we could accurately measure productivity, we could compensate it, but we don't. "Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st century management challenges." - Peter Drucker (the founder of modern management)
- sb8244 3y ago
  Not to beat a dead horse, but is 10x about 9x or 11x? Or is it about "a magnitude more output than others" (10x)? You don't necessarily need to quantify that exactly. If you've worked on a team with people like that, then you know it. Their managers know it too. To your main point, the size of the markets is drastically different. There is only so much room for headline rockstars and entertainers, but there's way more room for talented technologists. Having "rockstars" in the engineering world doesn't really reduce the size of the pie for others.
  - esafak 3y ago
    If you can't measure it, it might as well be 2x or "just better". If you can't prove your superior productivity, you are not going to get paid for it. Which is going to incentivize you to optimize for your company's promotion rubric instead, if you don't get fed up first. This leads to the lamented "promotion-driven design". Or you can ditch the middle man and take your talents straight to the market, through consulting or incorporation.
    - mgaunard 3y ago
      You can definitely measure it. I've seen many times where people were struggling with problems for months with tons of operational incidents, before someone experienced came in and solved it for good in a couple of days.
      - bee_rider 3y ago
        That sounds like “just better.” Or it could just be somebody that happened to have a crucial bit of domain knowledge. Or the original composition of the team could have included some negative-contributors.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        a team of people for months = 20 * 3 * 4 one guy for two days = 2 240/2 = 120
        bee_rider 3y ago
        So even if we believe in the hypothetical general purpose 10x programmer, a 120x one seems a little implausible, right? I think it must be a domain expert or something was really dysfunctional about the original team.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        In practice one very good guy can achieve as much as a whole badly managed organization. It's not necessarily that he's that much better technically, but he's got the right drive, focus, and business acumen, and isn't bound by methodology or legacy. The real problem with software development is that a lot of developers are too removed from the business to deliver something practical with value in the right places.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  My performance is measured in $ saved. Its pretty obvious your performance. We can take or reject projects, so if you are a bad predicter of use/time to completion, you are going to do worse.
  - esafak 3y ago
    It is hard to tie every job or action to revenue. Let's say I'm a platform engineer who makes internal tools. I generate no attributable revenue of my own; I make other engineers more efficient. But how much? We can't run an experiment where engineers don't use my platform because it's mandated; directly using the PaaS is forbidden. Or I'm a manager. I help my engineers get work done. Let's consider the happy case and assume we can measure our team's revenue. How much of that revenue is attributable to the manager's superior skill, and how much to the rockstars under him/her? What would an experiment look like; the engineers manage themselves, or we compare with the previous manager? No company that I know goes this far. In their defense, it is a challenge. An open problem, even.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
      > a platform engineer who makes internal tools You wouldn't run an A/B test to quantify your impact, but you could pretty easily do before/after metrics (or just collect them on the way during a graduated rollout) for any feature you're rolling out. It should be straightforward to quantify productivity benefit for a large initiative. > How much of that revenue is attributable to the manager's superior skill The output of a manager is the output of their team. We can't A/B test managers (or at least, we probably shouldn't), but we can look at a cohort of managers and see how well their teams are generating business impact. Combined with other data (e.g., upward feedback surveys, level-skip 1on1s, retention metrics, etc.), we can measure the impact of a manager.
      - esafak 3y ago
        > The output of a manager is the output of their team. People say that but it makes no sense. That means the same manager would have a different "output" going from one team to another. Are you going to cut his/her salary if he leaves a big, successful team to help fix a flailing team because it has less output? I get it: doing it this way is easy. My ideal is marginal attributable revenue or profit. How much better are you than the next person? We can haggle over the marginal part but I'm not conceding on attribution. Otherwise you're mooching off other people's work. Why are we paying you the big bucks? Show me what you did.
- chinchilla2020 3y ago
  Personally I think knowledge workers should be valued for... well.... knowledge. Turns out it was in the name all along. The person who understands and can solve your problems effectively is more valuable than a clueless person who cannot. It doesn't matter how many hours they spend in the office. What matters is technical knowledge on the sometimes confusing topics that arise at work.
Hermitian909 3y ago
They are, and it's reflected in the compensation. I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google. It also exists in a much more banal state lower down the ladder. I have friends who landed in the low end of the developer market. They literally cannot do most of the work I do. They don't understand DB isolation levels, they don't have the skills to design systems around eventual consistency, they are not familiar with basic distributed system problems like clock drift, etc. I'm not even an infrastructure engineer, this is just stuff I and my coworkers need to get through our days to ship product code. Could my friends do this stuff? If they applied themselves, sure! But they're not going to. It's also not enough to learn on the job. We occasionally hire someone who doesn't actually have the skillset and they usually flounder.
- esafak 3y ago
  Was he paid for his superior productivity, or for special skills?
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    Why not both? I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a percentage of the $ saved. He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost saving. Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he knew the domain from a previous job.
    - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
      > he could get a percentage of the $ saved I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated over the course of a single career. As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire-builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested all the savings seems like a much better model.

Are they? How do you know they are not 9x or 11x? It is hard to say because the industry (and I live in Silicon Valley) has no idea how to measure productivity. And this is reflected in salaries. If we could accurately measure productivity, we could compensate it, but we don't. "Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st century management challenges." - Peter Drucker (the founder of modern management)

sb8244 3y ago
Not to beat a dead horse, but is 10x about 9x or 11x? Or is it about "a magnitude more output than others" (10x)? You don't necessarily need to quantify that exactly. If you've worked on a team with people like that, then you know it. Their managers know it too. To your main point, the size of the markets is drastically different. There is only so much room for headline rockstars and entertainers, but there's way more room for talented technologists. Having "rockstars" in the engineering world doesn't really reduce the size of the pie for others.
- esafak 3y ago
  If you can't measure it, it might as well be 2x or "just better". If you can't prove your superior productivity, you are not going to get paid for it. Which is going to incentivize you to optimize for your company's promotion rubric instead, if you don't get fed up first. This leads to the lamented "promotion-driven design". Or you can ditch the middle man and take your talents straight to the market, through consulting or incorporation.
  - mgaunard 3y ago
    You can definitely measure it. I've seen many times where people were struggling with problems for months with tons of operational incidents, before someone experienced came in and solved it for good in a couple of days.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      That sounds like “just better.” Or it could just be somebody that happened to have a crucial bit of domain knowledge. Or the original composition of the team could have included some negative-contributors.
      - mgaunard 3y ago
        a team of people for months = 20 * 3 * 4 one guy for two days = 2 240/2 = 120
        bee_rider 3y ago
        So even if we believe in the hypothetical general purpose 10x programmer, a 120x one seems a little implausible, right? I think it must be a domain expert or something was really dysfunctional about the original team.
        mgaunard 3y ago
        In practice one very good guy can achieve as much as a whole badly managed organization. It's not necessarily that he's that much better technically, but he's got the right drive, focus, and business acumen, and isn't bound by methodology or legacy. The real problem with software development is that a lot of developers are too removed from the business to deliver something practical with value in the right places.
hospitalJail 3y ago
My performance is measured in $ saved. Its pretty obvious your performance. We can take or reject projects, so if you are a bad predicter of use/time to completion, you are going to do worse.
- esafak 3y ago
  It is hard to tie every job or action to revenue. Let's say I'm a platform engineer who makes internal tools. I generate no attributable revenue of my own; I make other engineers more efficient. But how much? We can't run an experiment where engineers don't use my platform because it's mandated; directly using the PaaS is forbidden. Or I'm a manager. I help my engineers get work done. Let's consider the happy case and assume we can measure our team's revenue. How much of that revenue is attributable to the manager's superior skill, and how much to the rockstars under him/her? What would an experiment look like; the engineers manage themselves, or we compare with the previous manager? No company that I know goes this far. In their defense, it is a challenge. An open problem, even.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    > a platform engineer who makes internal tools You wouldn't run an A/B test to quantify your impact, but you could pretty easily do before/after metrics (or just collect them on the way during a graduated rollout) for any feature you're rolling out. It should be straightforward to quantify productivity benefit for a large initiative. > How much of that revenue is attributable to the manager's superior skill The output of a manager is the output of their team. We can't A/B test managers (or at least, we probably shouldn't), but we can look at a cohort of managers and see how well their teams are generating business impact. Combined with other data (e.g., upward feedback surveys, level-skip 1on1s, retention metrics, etc.), we can measure the impact of a manager.
    - esafak 3y ago
      > The output of a manager is the output of their team. People say that but it makes no sense. That means the same manager would have a different "output" going from one team to another. Are you going to cut his/her salary if he leaves a big, successful team to help fix a flailing team because it has less output? I get it: doing it this way is easy. My ideal is marginal attributable revenue or profit. How much better are you than the next person? We can haggle over the marginal part but I'm not conceding on attribution. Otherwise you're mooching off other people's work. Why are we paying you the big bucks? Show me what you did.
chinchilla2020 3y ago
Personally I think knowledge workers should be valued for... well.... knowledge. Turns out it was in the name all along. The person who understands and can solve your problems effectively is more valuable than a clueless person who cannot. It doesn't matter how many hours they spend in the office. What matters is technical knowledge on the sometimes confusing topics that arise at work.

Hermitian909 3y ago

They are, and it's reflected in the compensation. I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google. It also exists in a much more banal state lower down the ladder. I have friends who landed in the low end of the developer market. They literally cannot do most of the work I do. They don't understand DB isolation levels, they don't have the skills to design systems around eventual consistency, they are not familiar with basic distributed system problems like clock drift, etc. I'm not even an infrastructure engineer, this is just stuff I and my coworkers need to get through our days to ship product code. Could my friends do this stuff? If they applied themselves, sure! But they're not going to. It's also not enough to learn on the job. We occasionally hire someone who doesn't actually have the skillset and they usually flounder.

esafak 3y ago
Was he paid for his superior productivity, or for special skills?
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Why not both? I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a percentage of the $ saved. He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost saving. Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he knew the domain from a previous job.
  - q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    > he could get a percentage of the $ saved I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated over the course of a single career. As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire-builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested all the savings seems like a much better model.