7 ms·

The persistence of talk about top engineers (or 1%, A players, etc.) makes me wonder whether there are any uses for the bottom 90-99%. Is the 89th percentile un

The persistence of talk about top engineers (or 1%, A players, etc.) makes me wonder whether there are any uses for the bottom 90-99%. Is the 89th percentile unemployable? Is it always really that important to have the comparatively best people (however you define and discover that), and not just someone who can do the required jobs well?

eranation 14y ago
In my very humble experience, I can't answer this scientifically, but I have known engineers that can be 1000% more productive than others. So if you have 100K$ to spend, looking for that top engineer is not just marginally better than the average one, it can be exponential. and this can determine the success of your business. I'm not talking about "smartest" or "knows the most technologies" or "has most stars on his github project", no I'm talking about people who can get things done, solve problems on their own, use the right tools for the right job, test their code, and have a good design. Surprisingly, it's so hard to find. Sometimes experience helps, but not always, sometimes pure IQ helps, but it's not a test of intelligence, it's a test of a mixture of qualities that gets you working software, consistently, with minimal bugs, without premature optimization, and code that doesn't look like an Italian favorite dish.
- up_and_up 14y ago
  > In my very humble experience, I can't answer this scientifically, but I have known engineers that can be 1000% more productive than others. In my very humble experience, I have worked alongside several people like this. None of them went to aforementioned 'Top Tier' schools and none of them worked at Google etc. One had an Associates degree in Physics and the other was a college dropout. But could they kick butt and write complex software at the speed of ten men, hell yes.
  - fuck_google 14y ago
    Don't tell that to Googlers who even seem to have trouble understanding that smart != wise.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
dave_sullivan 14y ago
Mid market is where the best value is. Give someone with promise a shot and mentor them and you'll end up with a great employee. The guy that works at Facebook, used to work for google, went to Stanford--might they be more likely to jump ship as soon as there's a new game in town? I guess it depends on what you're going for, but I don't think the "best and brightest" mantra is all its cracked up to be. People can become better and brighter with the right guidance--only hiring the best and brightest and considering it an all or nothing proposition is lazy. Edit: to be fair, as has been pointed out, there are engineers that are literally 1000x more productive, and they don't cost 1000x as much. That rare bird truly is best and brightest and is worth every penny. Trouble is, it's really tough to tell, and I don't know that the traits to look for are necessarily correlated with credentials typically attributed to "best and brightest". That is, those people don't all work at Facebook et al
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  At the top level it's also a game of keep-away. Google is more than willing to pay a premium sucking up all the brains in the valley and letting them sit around twiddling thumbs so that competitors don't get to them.
  - bmohlenhoff 14y ago
    Top engineers probably wouldn't be content merely sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. They want to build things.
    - munin 14y ago
      have you seen the food in the cafeteria? also did you know that they'll do your laundry here, and also every smart person who went to school with you works down the hall? oh yeah, and you can bring your dog to work? did I mention the food?
      - coopdog 14y ago
        No matter how good the benefits, if I'm not doing something meaningful I'm gone "20% time" could go along way toward solving this at Google though
crazygringo 14y ago
Of course not. The bottom 90-99% is incredibly useful. When you're building basic CRUD applications, when you need to write documentation, when you need to build test suites, I could go on. Debugging and bug fixes too. Let's face it -- in real-life business programming, there's a tremendous amount of "grunt work" that is not particularly intellectual. Hiring "A players" or the "1%" for that is just silly, wasting both money and talent. For a startup that can only afford two programmers that wants to do something uniquely different, however, hiring from within the top 1% may be quite essential.
- fuck_google 14y ago
  Perhaps that explains why Google and other companies obsessed about hiring "the best of the best" seem to struggle getting the basic stuff done. The "A players" only want to work on the interesting stuff and nobody is interested in doing the "grunt work" and giving the users what they actually want. For instance Google Docs still doesn't have decent table editing, header/footer handling or heading numbering, but for some reason they gave all kinds of useless stuff higher priority over the stuff that the users actually need. For instance automatic OCR + translation for scanned PDF docs somehow doesn't seem like the most useful feature for a word processor that is still missing much of the basic functionality.
sliverstorm 14y ago
Is the 89th percentile unemployable? Not a chance. As an example, I've heard it said that with old warplanes dogfighting, most of the planes were up there to let the flying aces work their magic. They distract, engage, and keep the enemy busy, and make it more difficult for the enemy to find and target the great pilots. Programming isn't exactly like dogfighting, but point being you can often leverage your non-aces to get things done to let the ace focus on other things, or even directly enhance the performance of your ace.
- fuck_google 14y ago
  That makes one wonder what is the outcome of a dogfight where you only have aces. Clusterfuck? Somehow that reminds me of the smart asses of Enron... http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm
svachalek 14y ago
A little asking around will show you that at least 75-80% of engineers are in the top 1%. The rest are either modest or incompetent and personally I wouldn't take chances.
- tsotha 14y ago
  This. Programming is a lot like sex - everyone is in the select few at the top. Just ask 'em.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  What I find is that if you like someone, you are liable to describe them as top 1%, and otherwise not. In other words, claimed capability substantially just indexes how well liked or respected someone is for reasons which don't necessarily have a lot to do with being 1000x more productive. This is like some old social psych study I read a long time ago (sorry - I can't remember the citation), where men would believe women were more intelligent when they were more attractive.
cnvogel 14y ago
As has been written by up_and_up as point #4 (and I think it's the most imporant task of them all), one key indicator of a truly good engineer is to analyze a complex problem into digestable/achievable chunks. And you want to have enough top/1%/A-engineers to make sure that this work is done properly. That's where in my oppinion the best talent should be put to use. And from filling in the blanks in good design, hopefully the 50%/B/average engineers will learn from and become good architects themselves! And, frankly, this is not restricted to engineering, but also what you'd want to have students learn from their advisors or craftspeople from their masters. Additionaly it also works the other way round: Given a company with only average people working on projects, I'd expect them to grow and improve at a much, much reduced rate , or maybe even have their work deteriorate because there's no one pointing out bad coding practices, or other engineering methods, creeping in.

eranation 14y ago

In my very humble experience, I can't answer this scientifically, but I have known engineers that can be 1000% more productive than others. So if you have 100K$ to spend, looking for that top engineer is not just marginally better than the average one, it can be exponential. and this can determine the success of your business. I'm not talking about "smartest" or "knows the most technologies" or "has most stars on his github project", no I'm talking about people who can get things done, solve problems on their own, use the right tools for the right job, test their code, and have a good design. Surprisingly, it's so hard to find. Sometimes experience helps, but not always, sometimes pure IQ helps, but it's not a test of intelligence, it's a test of a mixture of qualities that gets you working software, consistently, with minimal bugs, without premature optimization, and code that doesn't look like an Italian favorite dish.

up_and_up 14y ago
> In my very humble experience, I can't answer this scientifically, but I have known engineers that can be 1000% more productive than others. In my very humble experience, I have worked alongside several people like this. None of them went to aforementioned 'Top Tier' schools and none of them worked at Google etc. One had an Associates degree in Physics and the other was a college dropout. But could they kick butt and write complex software at the speed of ten men, hell yes.
- fuck_google 14y ago
  Don't tell that to Googlers who even seem to have trouble understanding that smart != wise.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

dave_sullivan 14y ago

Mid market is where the best value is. Give someone with promise a shot and mentor them and you'll end up with a great employee. The guy that works at Facebook, used to work for google, went to Stanford--might they be more likely to jump ship as soon as there's a new game in town? I guess it depends on what you're going for, but I don't think the "best and brightest" mantra is all its cracked up to be. People can become better and brighter with the right guidance--only hiring the best and brightest and considering it an all or nothing proposition is lazy. Edit: to be fair, as has been pointed out, there are engineers that are literally 1000x more productive, and they don't cost 1000x as much. That rare bird truly is best and brightest and is worth every penny. Trouble is, it's really tough to tell, and I don't know that the traits to look for are necessarily correlated with credentials typically attributed to "best and brightest". That is, those people don't all work at Facebook et al

alaskamiller 14y ago
At the top level it's also a game of keep-away. Google is more than willing to pay a premium sucking up all the brains in the valley and letting them sit around twiddling thumbs so that competitors don't get to them.
- bmohlenhoff 14y ago
  Top engineers probably wouldn't be content merely sitting around, twiddling their thumbs. They want to build things.
  - munin 14y ago
    have you seen the food in the cafeteria? also did you know that they'll do your laundry here, and also every smart person who went to school with you works down the hall? oh yeah, and you can bring your dog to work? did I mention the food?
    - coopdog 14y ago
      No matter how good the benefits, if I'm not doing something meaningful I'm gone "20% time" could go along way toward solving this at Google though

crazygringo 14y ago

Of course not. The bottom 90-99% is incredibly useful. When you're building basic CRUD applications, when you need to write documentation, when you need to build test suites, I could go on. Debugging and bug fixes too. Let's face it -- in real-life business programming, there's a tremendous amount of "grunt work" that is not particularly intellectual. Hiring "A players" or the "1%" for that is just silly, wasting both money and talent. For a startup that can only afford two programmers that wants to do something uniquely different, however, hiring from within the top 1% may be quite essential.

fuck_google 14y ago
Perhaps that explains why Google and other companies obsessed about hiring "the best of the best" seem to struggle getting the basic stuff done. The "A players" only want to work on the interesting stuff and nobody is interested in doing the "grunt work" and giving the users what they actually want. For instance Google Docs still doesn't have decent table editing, header/footer handling or heading numbering, but for some reason they gave all kinds of useless stuff higher priority over the stuff that the users actually need. For instance automatic OCR + translation for scanned PDF docs somehow doesn't seem like the most useful feature for a word processor that is still missing much of the basic functionality.

sliverstorm 14y ago

Is the 89th percentile unemployable? Not a chance. As an example, I've heard it said that with old warplanes dogfighting, most of the planes were up there to let the flying aces work their magic. They distract, engage, and keep the enemy busy, and make it more difficult for the enemy to find and target the great pilots. Programming isn't exactly like dogfighting, but point being you can often leverage your non-aces to get things done to let the ace focus on other things, or even directly enhance the performance of your ace.

fuck_google 14y ago
That makes one wonder what is the outcome of a dogfight where you only have aces. Clusterfuck? Somehow that reminds me of the smart asses of Enron... http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

svachalek 14y ago

A little asking around will show you that at least 75-80% of engineers are in the top 1%. The rest are either modest or incompetent and personally I wouldn't take chances.

tsotha 14y ago
This. Programming is a lot like sex - everyone is in the select few at the top. Just ask 'em.
slurgfest 14y ago
What I find is that if you like someone, you are liable to describe them as top 1%, and otherwise not. In other words, claimed capability substantially just indexes how well liked or respected someone is for reasons which don't necessarily have a lot to do with being 1000x more productive. This is like some old social psych study I read a long time ago (sorry - I can't remember the citation), where men would believe women were more intelligent when they were more attractive.

cnvogel 14y ago

As has been written by up_and_up as point #4 (and I think it's the most imporant task of them all), one key indicator of a truly good engineer is to analyze a complex problem into digestable/achievable chunks. And you want to have enough top/1%/A-engineers to make sure that this work is done properly. That's where in my oppinion the best talent should be put to use. And from filling in the blanks in good design, hopefully the 50%/B/average engineers will learn from and become good architects themselves! And, frankly, this is not restricted to engineering, but also what you'd want to have students learn from their advisors or craftspeople from their masters. Additionaly it also works the other way round: Given a company with only average people working on projects, I'd expect them to grow and improve at a much, much reduced rate , or maybe even have their work deteriorate because there's no one pointing out bad coding practices, or other engineering methods, creeping in.