3 ms·

>It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does I'd be happier if industry ca

>It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does I'd be happier if industry cares more for team productivity - I have witnessed how rewarding "10x" individuals may lead to perverse results on a wider scale, a la Cobra Effect. In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs quickly, but would create multiple smaller bugs and regressions for the 1x developers to fix while he moved to the next big problem worthy of his attention. Everyone else ended up being 0.7x - which made the curse of an engineer look even more productive comparatively! Because he was allowed to break the rules, there was a growing portion of the codebase that only he could work on - while it wasn't Rust, imagine an org has a "No Unsafe Rust" rule that is optional to 1 guy. Organizations ought to be very careful how they measure productivity, and should certainly look beyond first-order metrics.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago
I try to look at these things through the lens of “software literacy” - software is a form of literacy and this story might be better viewed as “a bunch of illiterate managers are impressed with one good writer at the encyclopdia publishers, now it turns out this guy makes mistakes, but hey, what do you expect when the management cannot read or write !”
JohnMakin 3y ago
> In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs quickly, but would create multiple smaller bugs and regressions for the 1x developers to fix while he moved to the next big problem worthy of his attention. Everyone else ended up being 0.7x - which made the curse of an engineer look even more productive comparatively! Because he was allowed to break the rules, bingo, well said. Worked on a team like this with a “principal” engineer who’d work very fast with bug-ridden work like this simply because he had the automatic blessing from on high to do whatever he wanted. My unfortunate task was to run along behind him and clean up, which to my credit I think I did a pretty good job at, but of course these types can only very rarely acknowledge/appreciate that. Eventually he got super insecure/threatened and attempted to push me out along with whoever else he felt was a threat to his fiefdom.
- chris_wot 3y ago
  What happened to him in the end?
  - JohnMakin 3y ago
    I don’t know, eventually the working environment got too toxic and I along with two other senior engineers quit. As far as I know he’s still running his little kingdom.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
Sure. A cohesive team of employees who stick together for more than 2 years is so rare. They can be so much more productive than a group of talented people who rotate a new person in and out every 3-6 months.

lifeisstillgood 3y ago

I try to look at these things through the lens of “software literacy” - software is a form of literacy and this story might be better viewed as “a bunch of illiterate managers are impressed with one good writer at the encyclopdia publishers, now it turns out this guy makes mistakes, but hey, what do you expect when the management cannot read or write !”

JohnMakin 3y ago

> In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs quickly, but would create multiple smaller bugs and regressions for the 1x developers to fix while he moved to the next big problem worthy of his attention. Everyone else ended up being 0.7x - which made the curse of an engineer look even more productive comparatively! Because he was allowed to break the rules, bingo, well said. Worked on a team like this with a “principal” engineer who’d work very fast with bug-ridden work like this simply because he had the automatic blessing from on high to do whatever he wanted. My unfortunate task was to run along behind him and clean up, which to my credit I think I did a pretty good job at, but of course these types can only very rarely acknowledge/appreciate that. Eventually he got super insecure/threatened and attempted to push me out along with whoever else he felt was a threat to his fiefdom.

chris_wot 3y ago
What happened to him in the end?
- JohnMakin 3y ago
  I don’t know, eventually the working environment got too toxic and I along with two other senior engineers quit. As far as I know he’s still running his little kingdom.

AlwaysRock 3y ago

Sure. A cohesive team of employees who stick together for more than 2 years is so rare. They can be so much more productive than a group of talented people who rotate a new person in and out every 3-6 months.