6 ms·

In praise of “normal” engineers

158 points by zdw 1y ago

lysace 1y ago
This is how you maintain/nurture a mature service/product. It also works when building something new with a captive audience (banking, insurance, etc.) Everything doesn’t need to be world-class. Sometimes long term development stability/resiliency is what matters.
acedTrex 1y ago
> The best engineering orgs are the ones where normal engineers can do great work I quite like this. It is absolutely true as well, not all teams can be 100% rockstars. How well do you enable the average dev to be good, maybe not GREAT but good and reliable.
- lizardking 1y ago
  Most great engineers were once good engineers. A healthy engineering organization helps its engineers on this path.
  - spimmy 1y ago
    yes! love this. and many great engineers will go back to being "good engineers" as they pick up new skills. rinse and repeat++
AlotOfReading 1y ago
There are large parts of this I really like, but it's hard to overstate just how much I disagree with the idea that "The only meaningful measure of productivity is impact to the business". The natural result of this view is a focus on quantifiable changes and short term thinking. The greatest value of experienced engineers is in avoiding landmines that will destroy a project or even a company. It's difficult to quantify things that never happen, or communicate the value in avoiding them in terms that don't sound wildly hyperbolic.
- Retric 1y ago
  “Impact on the business” isn’t inherently a short term viewpoint. Maximum impact is a long term proposition.
  - AlotOfReading 1y ago
    It's not inherently a short term viewpoint, that's just the typical and natural result of adopting this view. Measuring long term impacts is hard. Attributing them is even harder. Here's a real scenario. I worked for a company that evaluated by impact. They had a cellular modem with known issues in the field. A replacement was designed to fix those issues, but couldn't be backwards compatible. The cost to immediately upgrade the field units was high, so deployment was delayed to a cheaper, later time. One way of looking at this is that the decision saved millions of dollars and that argument was made. After the evaluation and before the deployment, a set of older field units failed in such a way that it made headlines across the country, which would have been prevented by the new units. So, was the impact of those decisions negative the whole time in an unknowable way? Did their impact become negative as soon as the incident occurred? If the incident was still possible but hadn't occurred, would the impact be different? People aren't good at evaluating things that haven't happened yet, so they'll tend to focus on the things they can see immediately in front of them. That incentivizes engineers to build things that have immediate short term impacts and discount long tail risks which can't be reliably evaluated.
- tikhonj 1y ago
  100%. I've taken to using intentionally fuzzy phrases to describe productivity/impact/effectiveness/whatever. Like, "in a holistic accounting, person X did a great job". It's not necessarily—in fact, necessarily not—easily quantifiable or legible, it requires some human insight and judgement, but so does any complex, creative endeavor. Trying to reduce management to metrics is inherently short-sighted.
- nonameiguess 1y ago
  I'm not sure I totally agree with measuring value by avoiding landmines or anything at all related to project management, but it definitely bugs me to see everything reduced to business impact. There are plenty of things in life that matter to individuals, to humanity, to the entire world at large, that have nothing to do with selling products for money. When I think of the engineers I revere the most, I don't think of titans of post-2001 Silicon Valley so much as John von Neumann, Robert Oppenheimer, Nikola Tesla, Leonardo DaVinci, whoever the hell built the Roman aqueducts and Egyptian pyramids, Babylonians and Mesoamericans who figured out how to predict eclipses. Did these people have a business impact? I guess Tesla made Westinghouse a lot of money at one point, but that seems far from the most distinguishing thing that made him great at what he did. If anything, he was mediocre at business. Even if we want to look at current titans of the computing industry, I admire the work done by orgs like Nvidia or humans like Geoff Hinton, but they also just got lucky that what they were doing for completely different reasons ended up benefiting so tremendously from the galaxy-scale data harvesting that has been going on due to the Internet becoming primarily ad-monetized, which they didn't know was going to happen. How many equally great engineers toiled in obscurity on dead ends but did equally great work? Doug Lenat was just as great an AI engineer, if not better, than Geoff Hinton. History just went one way and not the other, due to factors completely outside of the control of either of them.
ivape 1y ago
I’ve thought a lot about this my whole life. How do you build a good team? People simply don’t like each other so the natural sorting that happens is that teams hire for who they like and likes them in return (or at least in mating terms, will certainly appear as likable as can be). By definition, this can never be the most optimal team. There may have to be a different way to think about this. How can you have things that hate each other but still run an amazing operation? The best operation I can think of is a zoo. You have your tigers over here, and your penguins over there. The operation as a whole is amazing. A company of just tigers will destroy everything and a company of just penguins need too much caretaking. Most armed forces are not a “team”, they are an operation. If you constantly try to fit an operation into a team framework, that’s when you’ll try to turn penguins into tigers (how do you turn someone into a 100x engineer?). Or worse, you tell a tiger to chill out and relax with the penguins (you’re asking for trouble). If you need a 100x engineer, make sure the engineer is a thousand miles away and gets paid like it and far away from the normal engineers lest they start believing the tiger cage is suitable for penguins or vice versa. It’s a big operation, no teams. If you MUST build a team, then just be yourself. You probably are building something small dogs like, so hire a few street dogs and you won’t even need to worry about zoo-scale decisions and operations. You won’t need to go through the mistake of jamming 4 different species into the same enclosure to finally learn how things live separately but together.
- polytely 1y ago
  > People simply don’t like each other this seems like an insane statement to me, you can just hire for ability to function in a team?
  - ivape 1y ago
    You think people not liking each other is an insane statement? I'll paraphrase Thomas L Friedman on a recent thing he said about the middle east. He said, paraphrasing "never listen to what an Israeli or Palestinian tells you in English, always see what they say to each other in their own language". Obvious insight, but not well practiced. Do you think the amicable discourse on HN is indicative of feelings? Do you think the Hi and Hellos you get at work displays the true fabric of things? I'll just start with small examples in case you want to keep the convo going: 1) Leetcode is a thing How? Dude, there's dislike of a certain type of developer and obsession toward the idea of another type of developer. 2) Agile is a thing How? Dude, there is dislike for the autonomy and value a developer brings. 3) How do you turn a "normal" engineer into 10x engineer How is this question constructed? What is "normal" and who defined the ideal "10x"? How do you turn your "normal" wife into a dime? What? What kind of question is this? The business dislikes the price of a developer, how do we get more value for what we paid. These are the things you have to read into. ... N) Plenty more examples, the tech industry operates on shade because our PR game is so fake (seriously, remember the ping pong tables?) --- Which brings me back to "people don't really like each other" and good operations need to manage that.
tikhonj 1y ago
I definitely agree that the best teams have cultures that make even normal engineers incredibly effective compared to the status quo. Managers definitely put too much stock in hiring and "engineering quality" compared to culture, trust, systems and processes. > Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. But I have to wonder: if "any asshole" can build orgs like that, why don't they? I know of only a handful of orgs that actually manage to build strong teams of really strong engineers, and they're almost exclusively either trading firms or specialized/research-oriented teams. What's stopping everyone else? I guess this comes down to the initial point in the article: what do we even mean by "productivity"? (Or, the word I'd prefer: "effectiveness"?) There are lots of orgs where only experienced folks can succeed because they're the best at working around and tolerating disfunction. I've seen performance review processes that—intentionally or unintentionally—selected not for some general technical strength/taste/etc, but for the willingness, ability and stamina to put up with management dysfunction. But, to me, that is very much not what I have in mind when I think "top engineer".
- sorokod 1y ago
  Beyond budget constraints, those brilliant engineers may not be good team players. Their brilliance may be in the way of finding the necessary compromises and doing the required but not intellectually challenging work.
  - tikhonj 1y ago
    I dunno, almost all the brilliant engineers I've known have also been great team players and mentors. Not all, but I'd say it's pretty correlated. The reason brilliant assholes stand out is one of those statistical paradoxes whose name I've forgotten: somebody who's an asshole has to be brilliant to succeed, while team players can get pretty far with a wide range of skill levels.
    - spimmy 1y ago
      ha! ok, i never thought of it quite like that.
chickenzzzzu 1y ago
You spent all this time talking when you could have been coding.
paxys 1y ago
There are plenty of good "normal" engineers whose abilities top out at following direction from management, implementing a spec (albeit really well), adding to an existing architecture etc. I'd wager the vast majority of the industry falls into this category. Yes, it's very important for an org to ensure that these kinds of engineers are successful, because they are the workhorses of your company and without them nothing will get done. Ultimately though you can't have a workforce just of these engineers. Someone has to lead. Someone has to tell management what to build. Someone has to invent new tech from scratch. "10x engineer" is a bullshit LinkedIn thoughtfluencer term that has unfortunately caught on, but everyone who has worked in the industry for more than a day knows that there is a hierarchy in the tech org, and the ones on top are more valuable than the rest.
- ysofunny 1y ago
  > Someone has to invent new tech from scratch. uhm, as a research university or private company like a startup??
- commandersaki 1y ago
  10x engineer in the original sense to me is simply someone that 10x-es your company in some way. Maybe Avie Tevanian who brought Apple OSX/etc. or Andy Rubin who brought Google Android.
tikhonj 1y ago
> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. I see where this is coming from, but it's also pretty sad. In my experience, it tends to create environments where engineers are second-class citizens compared to managers or product: we're just responsible for "delivery", but can't independently make any real decisions beyond a tiny scope. Our timespan of discretion becomes measured in days or weeks, while, on the best teams I've seen, it's measured in months, quarters or years. It's counterintuitive, but you absolutely can have real individual owernship for engineers without creating single points of failure or brittle systems. It's a matter of having other sources of slack, encouraging quality work, and giving people a lot of room to fluidly adjust what they're working on when. Folks still have real ownership and can make longer-term decisions on their own, but they also collaborate in ad hoc ways and share tacit knowledge, so that somebody else can jump in, help out or even take over in a pinch. I'm being a bit vague, but all I can say is that I've seen this before, and I'll know it when I see it again. In practice, the model I saw did end up with more rewriting than a normal team—but we were still way more productive overall, even accounting for the rewrites! Turns out that rewriting systems incrementally, in self-contained chunks, is an amazing way to both evolve the design and to build up instutitional knowledge and capacity. It looks like waste, but it's actually slack that is crucial to making your system as a whole more flexible, adaptable and resilient. (In fact, that's true of a lot of the "waste" top-down management systems try to reduce—I'm incresingly convinced that anybody trying to optimize software team "utilization" is actively sabotaging the work!)
- dkarl 1y ago
  People outside of engineering can't give engineers immediate credit for long-term decisions. They don't have the competency to know what to reward. I'd go further and say that even within engineering, people outside of a team can't give immediate rewards for work whose long-term value is internal to the team, for the same reason: they don't know if the work you're doing is actually valuable or is just superficially similar to the kind of work that often does have long-term value. If you're confident enough in your long-term decisions, and how you spend slack time, then you should be fine with being rewarded for delivery, since you expect your long-term work to pay off in future delivery and future rewards.
raincole 1y ago
> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. Yeah, it's obviously not true. If it were true then the market salaries of coaches and trainers in professional sports would be really low. And they aren't.
alganet 1y ago
Fuck this. All engineers are normal engineers. Everyone can be an engineer.
ericvolp12 1y ago
> Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. This is basically the mantra of every platform team I've worked on. Your goal is to make the easy and obvious solution to engineers' problems the "right" one for the sustainability of software and reliability of services. Make it easy to ship things that are reliable and manage distributed state well and can scale well and engineers will build better muscle memory for building software in that shape and your whole org will benefit. This will never stop being true.
- simonw 1y ago
  Coincidentally, Charity Majors wrote one of my favorite essays about that too: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-path-and-scaling-teams-with-agency/ https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-pa... > Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers. > Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance). > Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.
physix 1y ago
It's a good article, but does it go without saying that when one says "engineers", it's about "software engineers"? One reason I clicked on this one is that I was hoping to learn stuff about engineers beyond just software. But it's a good read nevertheless. Thanks for that!
norir 1y ago
I tend to think that much of the difference between great and mediocre engineers comes down to mindset. The great engineers I've encountered have a commitment to making everything they touch better. They are adaptable and persevere. They believe they will either succeed at the task at hand or conclusively determine that it isn't possible given the current constraints. They recognize that failure will happen and do not get discouraged by it and instead see it as an opportunity to growth. When they encounter an issue caused by systemic problems, they will try to fix it systemically. They will not ship the first draft and will take a little it of extra time to get things right, which slows the initial release slightly but more than pays for itself with a dramatically lower maintenance burden. This type of engineer is often misunderstood and underappreciated by management. Management is often motivated by immediate short term goals. Instead of cherishing the work of the engineers who build the foundational systems that will enable the long term success of the org, they complain about them missing arbitrary short term goals and accuse them of doing engineering for engineering sake instead of real work. Management will celebrate the coder who whips up a buggy, but cool, feature in a week and will look the other way at the fact that the feature will always be a little bit broken because of its shoddy construction and instead will allocate some lesser engineers to maintain it. If instead the feature had been built correctly from the start, it may have been launched a bit later, but the overall cost will be much lower. Moreover, the poor engineers who are forced to maintain it (and let's be honest, the people who quickly churn out shoddy but shiny work almost never have to maintain it themselves) will not only be wasting their time, they will be actively internalizing the anti-patterns present in the code. This both inhibits their growth and understanding of good design principles and teaches them the bad lesson that crap is good and unless they have a uniquely strong character or good mentors, they will tend to either become demoralized (hurting their productivity and value to the company) or they will internalize the incentive to get out of maintenance work and build shoddy features of their own to pass down to the next poor soul. The truly great engineer is the one who breaks this cycle by building extendable systems that are correct by design and takes accountability for everything they ship. They raise up the entire org both by their work and example. In the long run, they will be far more productive and positively impactful than the sloppy cowboy coder. Unfortunately, the industry writ large celebrates and incentivizes cowboy coding so doing the right thing is very much against the grain. Indeed, the people who rise up the org chart tend to be the cowboys so they cannot even see the value of the other way and will often actively antagonize or undermine those who do the right thing (and threaten their dominant position in the org).
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Discussion on the previous IEEE Spectrum 'version' a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356995
- spimmy 1y ago
  oh wow i missed that, thank you!
anarticle 1y ago
This is all well and good, but it all hinges on your manager not being an insane maniac. All of those systems are great with the right manager, but if your manager is a KPI chaser / VP position seeker you are cooked. I have had managers that were essentially like a sergeant, serving engineers as a phalanx against the business so we can go fast. I have also had a manager who was so obsessed on showing off how much better of a dev he was than everyone else on the team, that he was largely hated and all talent on that team moved away if they could. I moved, and had a much better time in data science. I largely agree that killer onboarding, and a clear path to deploy are big wins for normalizing your dev culture to new hires. The measurement tech is always a double edged sword.
narag 1y ago
Some good points, bad logic. The fact that you can't effectively measure something doesn't mean that something doesn't exist. Individual productivity exists. Maybe it's easier to measure groups' productivity? Probably. "Business impact"? I don't think so, that later concept seems much more arbitrary. But feel free to look for the keys under the lamplight. If you choose that metrics, you're not going to retain many extra productive people anyway. The old problem: judging the work of an expert is very difficult if you lack comparable expertise. I can give you advice, but I can't make you smart to accept it. How could you tell if I'm a genius or an overconfident asshole?
- sailfast 1y ago
  A real genius can often explain their work without being an asshole, I think. So it’s fairly straightforward to tell the difference.
- tikhonj 1y ago
  the real problem is not that we can't measure productivity, but that we can't even fully define an abstract productivity metric—what does "productivity" even mean? we can come up with some notion that talks about the net effect of an individual (the "wins about replacement" of programmers), but that tells us absolutely nothing about how any given individual achieves that; hell, the net effect of any given individual is presumably a function of the entire context and the rest of the org, not just of the individual! alternatively we can try to define more direct notions of "productivity" even if we can't measure them, but those notions end up varied, multidimensional and, again, painfully context-specific—it's absolutely a useful thing to think about, but it does not let us pin down what a "top 1%" engineer "really" is, or even if that's a meaningful notion
- deleted 1y ago
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ljm 1y ago
I saw a post like this some time earlier this year and my first reaction is the same… Normal? Seriously? The article attempts to address this in an incredibly clumsy way by saying, well, everyone is normal in some way! It totally misses the mark and basically pays lip service to the issue after it set the stage, switching over to bigger picture diversity. Benefit of the doubt, the intention is to say ‘average’. The people in the middle of the bell curve. ‘Normal’ suggests that, outside of that range, you are abnormal if you are terrible and abnormal if you’re talented above or below the median. There’s a non-zero overlap between abnormal and neurodivergent, both ways. Given the number of occurrences of ‘10x engineer’ they should have gone with that and not ‘normal’.
- ivape 1y ago
  Once someone(s) pay a lot of money for something, they will always be critical of it. They literally bought the thing. You don't think I'd write articles about the pros/cons coulda/shoulda/woulda if I paid $180k for a car? A lot of businesses are truly poor and cannot afford buying the things they buy (in this case, it's people). Then the people have to go through their horrible post-mortem analysis. Build your own company, write your own shit, and stop analyzing how to min/max a person that was out of your league to begin with (never even in your price range comfortably, now shut up with what could have been done better). If for whatever reason the above paragraph addressed businesses that were rich, well then, I have nothing to really say about that, because in that case we're dealing with a monstrosity for which there are no words.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - ljm 1y ago
    Why does this read so much like a copypasta.
    - ivape 1y ago
      I guess I'm figuring out my voice.
physix 1y ago
> Build sociotechnical systems with “normal people” in mind From the perspective of the composition of software engineering teams: Most of us have to make due with the average, we strive to find the above average and avoid the mediocre, but mostly we are teams composed of "normal" people. The article has some good advice for making the best out of a group of normal people. It particularly relevant because it's unlikely that you'll see anything else.
Tade0 1y ago
> Are you using golang, python, COBOL, lisp, perl, React, or brainfuck? For years now I had this feeling that people confuse React with the entire frontend ecosystem, but dismissed it thinking that surely they're aware that there's a whole world of non-React frontend out there?
mlhpdx 1y ago
> someone who is a 10x engineer in a particular skill set is still going to have infinitely more areas where they are normal Yep. I’ve been here for a career or so with moments of brilliance and marathons of mediocrity, but consistent kindness (I hope).
deleted 1y ago
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bgwalter 1y ago
The article was commissioned by refactoring.fm, which, naturally, features Refactoring AI! Unsurprisingly the article comes to the conclusion that anyone can be trained, that 10x engineers are overrated, etc. The AI promotion strategy seems to be improving: AI is not mentioned in the article, but individual learning and meritocracy are dutifully devalued to fit the narrative.
mclau157 1y ago
Companies largely have terrible training and books of knowledge which leads to normal engineers not being able to do anything in an efficient manner. Unless they happen to ask a senior a specific tip (which seniors often take for granted and take no initiative to share) important knowledge could get lost forever
JohnMakin 1y ago
> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. That is not hard. And putting all the spotlight on individual ability has a way of letting your leaders off the hook for doing their jobs. It is a HUGE competitive advantage if you can build sociotechnical systems where less experienced engineers can convert their effort and energy into product and business momentum. This hits close to home for me recently. I don't profess to be a 10x engineer, but I found myself on a team with a few people with much less experience and competence than I am normally accustomed to. I started getting every single ticket with any kind of complexity, because I could get it done, and some people on my team couldn't. I could have continued this way, contributing a massive percentage of the output and claimed to be superior to everyone - but the reality is, for me anyway, this is exhausting (and feels really unfair). Plus I am a little lazy (as I believe all good sysadmins/sre's/ops guys are). I want my team to help me. So what I did was work extra for a few weeks and wrote a ton of abstractions over the most complex stuff we do (I dont write software, I write IAC, I'm aware this is a common pattern in software engineering) so that the less knowledgeable engineers could do the work I'd been doing much of. It freed my time up to work on more interesting problems. This was the first time in my career I had to do this without anyone already ordering me to. I've been on teams where there was someone like me and everyone else was running around behind them frantically trying to keep up or cleaning up the inevitable tech debt that accumulates. It's miserable and really inefficient.
alexandre_m 1y ago
> When your teams are used to operating with a mix of genders, racial backgrounds, identities, age ranges, family statuses, geographical locations, skill sets, etc — when this is just table stakes, standard operating procedure — you’re better equipped to roll with it when life happens. Resilience doesn’t come from having a “diverse” team on its own. What a shallow take. True resilience comes from mature teams with strong processes, clarity of roles, and the ability to adapt and recover effectively.
- thunderfork 1y ago
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zkmon 1y ago
At my company, I always prefer hiring average engineers with great attitude. Too many high-credential people with bad attitude were placed on high pedestals due to their perception-creating skills, and became immune to questioning. Once they bag that sweet perception from the boss, they also start bully around. Bosses would usually dismiss any data that goes against their perceptions. Mostly because going by perception is lot easier than looking into the data.
tasuki 1y ago
> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software, what matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own. Yes, and there are often teams of one. I am currently in such a team. Even though I work on a different problem than other "teams", I think it's reasonably easy to eyeball the relative productivity (not in my favour, in my current circumstances; though, to the credit of my superiors, they're being very patient with me).
rebeccaskinner 1y ago
I’ve been lucky enough to work on a number of teams in my career that are full of brilliant high performing people who are also kind, empathetic, and focused working together to deliver something to customers. These days I’m lucky enough to lead a team like that. Counter to the article, in my experience these are the hardest teams to manage well because organizations typically aren’t set up to deal with them. Larger companies tend to lean into standardization and making things accessible to average engineers in ways that make high performing teams less effective and often demotivated. I think this is an overly cynical approach that assumes that you can’t invest and grow people into exceptional engineers. In my experience you can if you are willing to invest in it, and the long term benefit of having more high performing engineers who aren’t being restricted from doing good work outweighs the cost of training and growing people.
paulddraper 1y ago
Great products are not build by normal engineers. They are built by Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Larry/Sergey, Greg Brockman.

158 points by zdw 1y ago

This is how you maintain/nurture a mature service/product. It also works when building something new with a captive audience (banking, insurance, etc.) Everything doesn’t need to be world-class. Sometimes long term development stability/resiliency is what matters.

acedTrex 1y ago

> The best engineering orgs are the ones where normal engineers can do great work I quite like this. It is absolutely true as well, not all teams can be 100% rockstars. How well do you enable the average dev to be good, maybe not GREAT but good and reliable.

lizardking 1y ago
Most great engineers were once good engineers. A healthy engineering organization helps its engineers on this path.
- spimmy 1y ago
  yes! love this. and many great engineers will go back to being "good engineers" as they pick up new skills. rinse and repeat++

AlotOfReading 1y ago

There are large parts of this I really like, but it's hard to overstate just how much I disagree with the idea that "The only meaningful measure of productivity is impact to the business". The natural result of this view is a focus on quantifiable changes and short term thinking. The greatest value of experienced engineers is in avoiding landmines that will destroy a project or even a company. It's difficult to quantify things that never happen, or communicate the value in avoiding them in terms that don't sound wildly hyperbolic.

Retric 1y ago
“Impact on the business” isn’t inherently a short term viewpoint. Maximum impact is a long term proposition.
- AlotOfReading 1y ago
  It's not inherently a short term viewpoint, that's just the typical and natural result of adopting this view. Measuring long term impacts is hard. Attributing them is even harder. Here's a real scenario. I worked for a company that evaluated by impact. They had a cellular modem with known issues in the field. A replacement was designed to fix those issues, but couldn't be backwards compatible. The cost to immediately upgrade the field units was high, so deployment was delayed to a cheaper, later time. One way of looking at this is that the decision saved millions of dollars and that argument was made. After the evaluation and before the deployment, a set of older field units failed in such a way that it made headlines across the country, which would have been prevented by the new units. So, was the impact of those decisions negative the whole time in an unknowable way? Did their impact become negative as soon as the incident occurred? If the incident was still possible but hadn't occurred, would the impact be different? People aren't good at evaluating things that haven't happened yet, so they'll tend to focus on the things they can see immediately in front of them. That incentivizes engineers to build things that have immediate short term impacts and discount long tail risks which can't be reliably evaluated.
tikhonj 1y ago
100%. I've taken to using intentionally fuzzy phrases to describe productivity/impact/effectiveness/whatever. Like, "in a holistic accounting, person X did a great job". It's not necessarily—in fact, necessarily not—easily quantifiable or legible, it requires some human insight and judgement, but so does any complex, creative endeavor. Trying to reduce management to metrics is inherently short-sighted.
nonameiguess 1y ago
I'm not sure I totally agree with measuring value by avoiding landmines or anything at all related to project management, but it definitely bugs me to see everything reduced to business impact. There are plenty of things in life that matter to individuals, to humanity, to the entire world at large, that have nothing to do with selling products for money. When I think of the engineers I revere the most, I don't think of titans of post-2001 Silicon Valley so much as John von Neumann, Robert Oppenheimer, Nikola Tesla, Leonardo DaVinci, whoever the hell built the Roman aqueducts and Egyptian pyramids, Babylonians and Mesoamericans who figured out how to predict eclipses. Did these people have a business impact? I guess Tesla made Westinghouse a lot of money at one point, but that seems far from the most distinguishing thing that made him great at what he did. If anything, he was mediocre at business. Even if we want to look at current titans of the computing industry, I admire the work done by orgs like Nvidia or humans like Geoff Hinton, but they also just got lucky that what they were doing for completely different reasons ended up benefiting so tremendously from the galaxy-scale data harvesting that has been going on due to the Internet becoming primarily ad-monetized, which they didn't know was going to happen. How many equally great engineers toiled in obscurity on dead ends but did equally great work? Doug Lenat was just as great an AI engineer, if not better, than Geoff Hinton. History just went one way and not the other, due to factors completely outside of the control of either of them.

ivape 1y ago

I’ve thought a lot about this my whole life. How do you build a good team? People simply don’t like each other so the natural sorting that happens is that teams hire for who they like and likes them in return (or at least in mating terms, will certainly appear as likable as can be). By definition, this can never be the most optimal team. There may have to be a different way to think about this. How can you have things that hate each other but still run an amazing operation? The best operation I can think of is a zoo. You have your tigers over here, and your penguins over there. The operation as a whole is amazing. A company of just tigers will destroy everything and a company of just penguins need too much caretaking. Most armed forces are not a “team”, they are an operation. If you constantly try to fit an operation into a team framework, that’s when you’ll try to turn penguins into tigers (how do you turn someone into a 100x engineer?). Or worse, you tell a tiger to chill out and relax with the penguins (you’re asking for trouble). If you need a 100x engineer, make sure the engineer is a thousand miles away and gets paid like it and far away from the normal engineers lest they start believing the tiger cage is suitable for penguins or vice versa. It’s a big operation, no teams. If you MUST build a team, then just be yourself. You probably are building something small dogs like, so hire a few street dogs and you won’t even need to worry about zoo-scale decisions and operations. You won’t need to go through the mistake of jamming 4 different species into the same enclosure to finally learn how things live separately but together.

polytely 1y ago
> People simply don’t like each other this seems like an insane statement to me, you can just hire for ability to function in a team?
- ivape 1y ago
  You think people not liking each other is an insane statement? I'll paraphrase Thomas L Friedman on a recent thing he said about the middle east. He said, paraphrasing "never listen to what an Israeli or Palestinian tells you in English, always see what they say to each other in their own language". Obvious insight, but not well practiced. Do you think the amicable discourse on HN is indicative of feelings? Do you think the Hi and Hellos you get at work displays the true fabric of things? I'll just start with small examples in case you want to keep the convo going: 1) Leetcode is a thing How? Dude, there's dislike of a certain type of developer and obsession toward the idea of another type of developer. 2) Agile is a thing How? Dude, there is dislike for the autonomy and value a developer brings. 3) How do you turn a "normal" engineer into 10x engineer How is this question constructed? What is "normal" and who defined the ideal "10x"? How do you turn your "normal" wife into a dime? What? What kind of question is this? The business dislikes the price of a developer, how do we get more value for what we paid. These are the things you have to read into. ... N) Plenty more examples, the tech industry operates on shade because our PR game is so fake (seriously, remember the ping pong tables?) --- Which brings me back to "people don't really like each other" and good operations need to manage that.

tikhonj 1y ago

I definitely agree that the best teams have cultures that make even normal engineers incredibly effective compared to the status quo. Managers definitely put too much stock in hiring and "engineering quality" compared to culture, trust, systems and processes. > Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. But I have to wonder: if "any asshole" can build orgs like that, why don't they? I know of only a handful of orgs that actually manage to build strong teams of really strong engineers, and they're almost exclusively either trading firms or specialized/research-oriented teams. What's stopping everyone else? I guess this comes down to the initial point in the article: what do we even mean by "productivity"? (Or, the word I'd prefer: "effectiveness"?) There are lots of orgs where only experienced folks can succeed because they're the best at working around and tolerating disfunction. I've seen performance review processes that—intentionally or unintentionally—selected not for some general technical strength/taste/etc, but for the willingness, ability and stamina to put up with management dysfunction. But, to me, that is very much not what I have in mind when I think "top engineer".

sorokod 1y ago
Beyond budget constraints, those brilliant engineers may not be good team players. Their brilliance may be in the way of finding the necessary compromises and doing the required but not intellectually challenging work.
- tikhonj 1y ago
  I dunno, almost all the brilliant engineers I've known have also been great team players and mentors. Not all, but I'd say it's pretty correlated. The reason brilliant assholes stand out is one of those statistical paradoxes whose name I've forgotten: somebody who's an asshole has to be brilliant to succeed, while team players can get pretty far with a wide range of skill levels.
  - spimmy 1y ago
    ha! ok, i never thought of it quite like that.

chickenzzzzu 1y ago

You spent all this time talking when you could have been coding.

paxys 1y ago

There are plenty of good "normal" engineers whose abilities top out at following direction from management, implementing a spec (albeit really well), adding to an existing architecture etc. I'd wager the vast majority of the industry falls into this category. Yes, it's very important for an org to ensure that these kinds of engineers are successful, because they are the workhorses of your company and without them nothing will get done. Ultimately though you can't have a workforce just of these engineers. Someone has to lead. Someone has to tell management what to build. Someone has to invent new tech from scratch. "10x engineer" is a bullshit LinkedIn thoughtfluencer term that has unfortunately caught on, but everyone who has worked in the industry for more than a day knows that there is a hierarchy in the tech org, and the ones on top are more valuable than the rest.

ysofunny 1y ago
> Someone has to invent new tech from scratch. uhm, as a research university or private company like a startup??
commandersaki 1y ago
10x engineer in the original sense to me is simply someone that 10x-es your company in some way. Maybe Avie Tevanian who brought Apple OSX/etc. or Andy Rubin who brought Google Android.

tikhonj 1y ago

> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. I see where this is coming from, but it's also pretty sad. In my experience, it tends to create environments where engineers are second-class citizens compared to managers or product: we're just responsible for "delivery", but can't independently make any real decisions beyond a tiny scope. Our timespan of discretion becomes measured in days or weeks, while, on the best teams I've seen, it's measured in months, quarters or years. It's counterintuitive, but you absolutely can have real individual owernship for engineers without creating single points of failure or brittle systems. It's a matter of having other sources of slack, encouraging quality work, and giving people a lot of room to fluidly adjust what they're working on when. Folks still have real ownership and can make longer-term decisions on their own, but they also collaborate in ad hoc ways and share tacit knowledge, so that somebody else can jump in, help out or even take over in a pinch. I'm being a bit vague, but all I can say is that I've seen this before, and I'll know it when I see it again. In practice, the model I saw did end up with more rewriting than a normal team—but we were still way more productive overall, even accounting for the rewrites! Turns out that rewriting systems incrementally, in self-contained chunks, is an amazing way to both evolve the design and to build up instutitional knowledge and capacity. It looks like waste, but it's actually slack that is crucial to making your system as a whole more flexible, adaptable and resilient. (In fact, that's true of a lot of the "waste" top-down management systems try to reduce—I'm incresingly convinced that anybody trying to optimize software team "utilization" is actively sabotaging the work!)

dkarl 1y ago
People outside of engineering can't give engineers immediate credit for long-term decisions. They don't have the competency to know what to reward. I'd go further and say that even within engineering, people outside of a team can't give immediate rewards for work whose long-term value is internal to the team, for the same reason: they don't know if the work you're doing is actually valuable or is just superficially similar to the kind of work that often does have long-term value. If you're confident enough in your long-term decisions, and how you spend slack time, then you should be fine with being rewarded for delivery, since you expect your long-term work to pay off in future delivery and future rewards.

raincole 1y ago

> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. Yeah, it's obviously not true. If it were true then the market salaries of coaches and trainers in professional sports would be really low. And they aren't.

alganet 1y ago

Fuck this. All engineers are normal engineers. Everyone can be an engineer.

ericvolp12 1y ago

> Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. This is basically the mantra of every platform team I've worked on. Your goal is to make the easy and obvious solution to engineers' problems the "right" one for the sustainability of software and reliability of services. Make it easy to ship things that are reliable and manage distributed state well and can scale well and engineers will build better muscle memory for building software in that shape and your whole org will benefit. This will never stop being true.

simonw 1y ago
Coincidentally, Charity Majors wrote one of my favorite essays about that too: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-path-and-scaling-teams-with-agency/ https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-pa... > Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers. > Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance). > Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.

physix 1y ago

It's a good article, but does it go without saying that when one says "engineers", it's about "software engineers"? One reason I clicked on this one is that I was hoping to learn stuff about engineers beyond just software. But it's a good read nevertheless. Thanks for that!

norir 1y ago

I tend to think that much of the difference between great and mediocre engineers comes down to mindset. The great engineers I've encountered have a commitment to making everything they touch better. They are adaptable and persevere. They believe they will either succeed at the task at hand or conclusively determine that it isn't possible given the current constraints. They recognize that failure will happen and do not get discouraged by it and instead see it as an opportunity to growth. When they encounter an issue caused by systemic problems, they will try to fix it systemically. They will not ship the first draft and will take a little it of extra time to get things right, which slows the initial release slightly but more than pays for itself with a dramatically lower maintenance burden. This type of engineer is often misunderstood and underappreciated by management. Management is often motivated by immediate short term goals. Instead of cherishing the work of the engineers who build the foundational systems that will enable the long term success of the org, they complain about them missing arbitrary short term goals and accuse them of doing engineering for engineering sake instead of real work. Management will celebrate the coder who whips up a buggy, but cool, feature in a week and will look the other way at the fact that the feature will always be a little bit broken because of its shoddy construction and instead will allocate some lesser engineers to maintain it. If instead the feature had been built correctly from the start, it may have been launched a bit later, but the overall cost will be much lower. Moreover, the poor engineers who are forced to maintain it (and let's be honest, the people who quickly churn out shoddy but shiny work almost never have to maintain it themselves) will not only be wasting their time, they will be actively internalizing the anti-patterns present in the code. This both inhibits their growth and understanding of good design principles and teaches them the bad lesson that crap is good and unless they have a uniquely strong character or good mentors, they will tend to either become demoralized (hurting their productivity and value to the company) or they will internalize the incentive to get out of maintenance work and build shoddy features of their own to pass down to the next poor soul. The truly great engineer is the one who breaks this cycle by building extendable systems that are correct by design and takes accountability for everything they ship. They raise up the entire org both by their work and example. In the long run, they will be far more productive and positively impactful than the sloppy cowboy coder. Unfortunately, the industry writ large celebrates and incentivizes cowboy coding so doing the right thing is very much against the grain. Indeed, the people who rise up the org chart tend to be the cowboys so they cannot even see the value of the other way and will often actively antagonize or undermine those who do the right thing (and threaten their dominant position in the org).

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Discussion on the previous IEEE Spectrum 'version' a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43356995

spimmy 1y ago
oh wow i missed that, thank you!

anarticle 1y ago

This is all well and good, but it all hinges on your manager not being an insane maniac. All of those systems are great with the right manager, but if your manager is a KPI chaser / VP position seeker you are cooked. I have had managers that were essentially like a sergeant, serving engineers as a phalanx against the business so we can go fast. I have also had a manager who was so obsessed on showing off how much better of a dev he was than everyone else on the team, that he was largely hated and all talent on that team moved away if they could. I moved, and had a much better time in data science. I largely agree that killer onboarding, and a clear path to deploy are big wins for normalizing your dev culture to new hires. The measurement tech is always a double edged sword.

narag 1y ago

Some good points, bad logic. The fact that you can't effectively measure something doesn't mean that something doesn't exist. Individual productivity exists. Maybe it's easier to measure groups' productivity? Probably. "Business impact"? I don't think so, that later concept seems much more arbitrary. But feel free to look for the keys under the lamplight. If you choose that metrics, you're not going to retain many extra productive people anyway. The old problem: judging the work of an expert is very difficult if you lack comparable expertise. I can give you advice, but I can't make you smart to accept it. How could you tell if I'm a genius or an overconfident asshole?

sailfast 1y ago
A real genius can often explain their work without being an asshole, I think. So it’s fairly straightforward to tell the difference.
tikhonj 1y ago
the real problem is not that we can't measure productivity, but that we can't even fully define an abstract productivity metric—what does "productivity" even mean? we can come up with some notion that talks about the net effect of an individual (the "wins about replacement" of programmers), but that tells us absolutely nothing about how any given individual achieves that; hell, the net effect of any given individual is presumably a function of the entire context and the rest of the org, not just of the individual! alternatively we can try to define more direct notions of "productivity" even if we can't measure them, but those notions end up varied, multidimensional and, again, painfully context-specific—it's absolutely a useful thing to think about, but it does not let us pin down what a "top 1%" engineer "really" is, or even if that's a meaningful notion
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ljm 1y ago

I saw a post like this some time earlier this year and my first reaction is the same… Normal? Seriously? The article attempts to address this in an incredibly clumsy way by saying, well, everyone is normal in some way! It totally misses the mark and basically pays lip service to the issue after it set the stage, switching over to bigger picture diversity. Benefit of the doubt, the intention is to say ‘average’. The people in the middle of the bell curve. ‘Normal’ suggests that, outside of that range, you are abnormal if you are terrible and abnormal if you’re talented above or below the median. There’s a non-zero overlap between abnormal and neurodivergent, both ways. Given the number of occurrences of ‘10x engineer’ they should have gone with that and not ‘normal’.

ivape 1y ago
Once someone(s) pay a lot of money for something, they will always be critical of it. They literally bought the thing. You don't think I'd write articles about the pros/cons coulda/shoulda/woulda if I paid $180k for a car? A lot of businesses are truly poor and cannot afford buying the things they buy (in this case, it's people). Then the people have to go through their horrible post-mortem analysis. Build your own company, write your own shit, and stop analyzing how to min/max a person that was out of your league to begin with (never even in your price range comfortably, now shut up with what could have been done better). If for whatever reason the above paragraph addressed businesses that were rich, well then, I have nothing to really say about that, because in that case we're dealing with a monstrosity for which there are no words.
- deleted 1y ago
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- ljm 1y ago
  Why does this read so much like a copypasta.
  - ivape 1y ago
    I guess I'm figuring out my voice.

physix 1y ago

> Build sociotechnical systems with “normal people” in mind From the perspective of the composition of software engineering teams: Most of us have to make due with the average, we strive to find the above average and avoid the mediocre, but mostly we are teams composed of "normal" people. The article has some good advice for making the best out of a group of normal people. It particularly relevant because it's unlikely that you'll see anything else.

Tade0 1y ago

> Are you using golang, python, COBOL, lisp, perl, React, or brainfuck? For years now I had this feeling that people confuse React with the entire frontend ecosystem, but dismissed it thinking that surely they're aware that there's a whole world of non-React frontend out there?

mlhpdx 1y ago

> someone who is a 10x engineer in a particular skill set is still going to have infinitely more areas where they are normal Yep. I’ve been here for a career or so with moments of brilliance and marathons of mediocrity, but consistent kindness (I hope).

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bgwalter 1y ago

The article was commissioned by refactoring.fm, which, naturally, features Refactoring AI! Unsurprisingly the article comes to the conclusion that anyone can be trained, that 10x engineers are overrated, etc. The AI promotion strategy seems to be improving: AI is not mentioned in the article, but individual learning and meritocracy are dutifully devalued to fit the narrative.

mclau157 1y ago

Companies largely have terrible training and books of knowledge which leads to normal engineers not being able to do anything in an efficient manner. Unless they happen to ask a senior a specific tip (which seniors often take for granted and take no initiative to share) important knowledge could get lost forever

JohnMakin 1y ago

> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress. That is not hard. And putting all the spotlight on individual ability has a way of letting your leaders off the hook for doing their jobs. It is a HUGE competitive advantage if you can build sociotechnical systems where less experienced engineers can convert their effort and energy into product and business momentum. This hits close to home for me recently. I don't profess to be a 10x engineer, but I found myself on a team with a few people with much less experience and competence than I am normally accustomed to. I started getting every single ticket with any kind of complexity, because I could get it done, and some people on my team couldn't. I could have continued this way, contributing a massive percentage of the output and claimed to be superior to everyone - but the reality is, for me anyway, this is exhausting (and feels really unfair). Plus I am a little lazy (as I believe all good sysadmins/sre's/ops guys are). I want my team to help me. So what I did was work extra for a few weeks and wrote a ton of abstractions over the most complex stuff we do (I dont write software, I write IAC, I'm aware this is a common pattern in software engineering) so that the less knowledgeable engineers could do the work I'd been doing much of. It freed my time up to work on more interesting problems. This was the first time in my career I had to do this without anyone already ordering me to. I've been on teams where there was someone like me and everyone else was running around behind them frantically trying to keep up or cleaning up the inevitable tech debt that accumulates. It's miserable and really inefficient.

alexandre_m 1y ago

> When your teams are used to operating with a mix of genders, racial backgrounds, identities, age ranges, family statuses, geographical locations, skill sets, etc — when this is just table stakes, standard operating procedure — you’re better equipped to roll with it when life happens. Resilience doesn’t come from having a “diverse” team on its own. What a shallow take. True resilience comes from mature teams with strong processes, clarity of roles, and the ability to adapt and recover effectively.

thunderfork 1y ago
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zkmon 1y ago

At my company, I always prefer hiring average engineers with great attitude. Too many high-credential people with bad attitude were placed on high pedestals due to their perception-creating skills, and became immune to questioning. Once they bag that sweet perception from the boss, they also start bully around. Bosses would usually dismiss any data that goes against their perceptions. Mostly because going by perception is lot easier than looking into the data.

tasuki 1y ago

> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software, what matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own. Yes, and there are often teams of one. I am currently in such a team. Even though I work on a different problem than other "teams", I think it's reasonably easy to eyeball the relative productivity (not in my favour, in my current circumstances; though, to the credit of my superiors, they're being very patient with me).

rebeccaskinner 1y ago

I’ve been lucky enough to work on a number of teams in my career that are full of brilliant high performing people who are also kind, empathetic, and focused working together to deliver something to customers. These days I’m lucky enough to lead a team like that. Counter to the article, in my experience these are the hardest teams to manage well because organizations typically aren’t set up to deal with them. Larger companies tend to lean into standardization and making things accessible to average engineers in ways that make high performing teams less effective and often demotivated. I think this is an overly cynical approach that assumes that you can’t invest and grow people into exceptional engineers. In my experience you can if you are willing to invest in it, and the long term benefit of having more high performing engineers who aren’t being restricted from doing good work outweighs the cost of training and growing people.

paulddraper 1y ago

Great products are not build by normal engineers. They are built by Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Larry/Sergey, Greg Brockman.