4 ms·

> What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k? Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and

> What skills in which areas are routinely worth north of $250k? Anecdotally, it's not a specific skill, but a talent for solving problems using any tools and skills necessary. The 10x developer is real, and he's not afraid to read a damn textbook or go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
"go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job" EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff. So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."
- ScottBurson 11y ago
  As glad as I am to see someone mention all this great old technology, I feel compelled to point out that the GC on the MIT Scheme chip was not pauseless. It was a fairly simple mark-sweep collector.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I'm talking about this one (see Storage Management on p17): http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-514.pdf http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-... They had to leave it out of the first prototype due to space constraints but describe the approach. They build a second, state machine into storage interface that continuously looks for stuff it can reclaim. The idea was clearly to make it concurrent and use dedicated circuits. An enterprising reader of old wisdom would combine this with any number of parallel/concurrent algorithms in literature to achieve GC w/ predictable, performance impact. That work was later referenced in a 1976 treatment of the subject that worked out foundational issues for concurrent collection: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-93fe-1845088e5d58/P_1866_1258.pdf http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-... Most work in GC from them on focused on software implementations. Did find a hardware implementation in embedded space with some interesting choices: http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf So, the original LISP machines and many later used mark-and-sweep often around or during a heap exhaustion. There were concurrent ones, with most using software. The Steele chip describes a concurrent design w/ straightforward implementation in hardware. That combined with literature gave people more than enough to acceptably solve this problem.
codeonfire 11y ago
Yes, but everybody thinks they are a 10x developer and everyone else is shit. Big companies know exactly how to take advantage of these dummies. "What you're not done yet, I thought you were a 10x developer. Better get it working this weekend."
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  Huh. FWIW, I do consider myself 10x. I've only rarely met developers who claim 10x but who weren't at least good developers. And I have met developers who were crap, but I don't think it of everyone else. Just the ones who were crap. ;) It is true that I think of myself as particularly good. For reference, I was working for one of those companies I listed above, and I put in less than 30 hours in a typical week, and still got heaps of praise for how quickly I got things done (in calendar time). I kept asking for more to do, but never really got enough to keep me busy full time. Ultimately I ended up helping with related projects, or company-wide tooling, just because I enjoyed helping and had the time. I didn't feel the need to prove anything, exactly, but sometimes things would go south and I'd put in more hours because I felt like something should have taken less time, yes. That's not "prove to me you're 10x!", but my work ethic coming out and keeping me on task until my expected workload was actually complete. But even then I don't think I went beyond 45 hours in a week in my time there as an employee. And I didn't work on a weekend even once. If something really hadn't gotten done in what I felt like was a reasonable work week, I would have let it slide. That may have happened once, but only once. Making the proprietary company build system do things it wasn't precisely designed to do ... well, I just can't talk about it, since I don't swear in public posts. ;)
  - pc86 11y ago
    > FWIW, I do consider myself 10x. Shocking.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

"go to the library and study CS papers if that's what it takes to do the job" EXACTLY! I've been knocking them off for years. Most modern problems are variations on older ones. First step is to see if someone solved it already, how, and if I can use it. So, stopping code injection for example, I find that all kinds of hardware from 1960-1980 tagged memory & used CPU in ways that prevented it. Stack overflowing S.P.? Use a reverse stack like MULTICS. Pauseless GC? Put one in memory controller on your FPGA/ASIC like a Scheme machine did. I could go on all day on this stuff. So much wisdom in relatively, few books and a bunch of papers. I wish someone would figure out a way to collect, organize, and spread them. That way people might stop asking me things like whether OS's can be written in "managed code." Stock reply: "type Niklaus Wirth or Oberon System into Google."

ScottBurson 11y ago
As glad as I am to see someone mention all this great old technology, I feel compelled to point out that the GC on the MIT Scheme chip was not pauseless. It was a fairly simple mark-sweep collector.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I'm talking about this one (see Storage Management on p17): http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-514.pdf http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-... They had to leave it out of the first prototype due to space constraints but describe the approach. They build a second, state machine into storage interface that continuously looks for stuff it can reclaim. The idea was clearly to make it concurrent and use dedicated circuits. An enterprising reader of old wisdom would combine this with any number of parallel/concurrent algorithms in literature to achieve GC w/ predictable, performance impact. That work was later referenced in a 1976 treatment of the subject that worked out foundational issues for concurrent collection: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-93fe-1845088e5d58/P_1866_1258.pdf http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:8b7d64a2-e9a7-4b04-... Most work in GC from them on focused on software implementations. Did find a hardware implementation in embedded space with some interesting choices: http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf http://www.ece.iastate.edu/~morris/papers/IEEE_TMC_03.pdf So, the original LISP machines and many later used mark-and-sweep often around or during a heap exhaustion. There were concurrent ones, with most using software. The Steele chip describes a concurrent design w/ straightforward implementation in hardware. That combined with literature gave people more than enough to acceptably solve this problem.

codeonfire 11y ago

Yes, but everybody thinks they are a 10x developer and everyone else is shit. Big companies know exactly how to take advantage of these dummies. "What you're not done yet, I thought you were a 10x developer. Better get it working this weekend."

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
Huh. FWIW, I do consider myself 10x. I've only rarely met developers who claim 10x but who weren't at least good developers. And I have met developers who were crap, but I don't think it of everyone else. Just the ones who were crap. ;) It is true that I think of myself as particularly good. For reference, I was working for one of those companies I listed above, and I put in less than 30 hours in a typical week, and still got heaps of praise for how quickly I got things done (in calendar time). I kept asking for more to do, but never really got enough to keep me busy full time. Ultimately I ended up helping with related projects, or company-wide tooling, just because I enjoyed helping and had the time. I didn't feel the need to prove anything, exactly, but sometimes things would go south and I'd put in more hours because I felt like something should have taken less time, yes. That's not "prove to me you're 10x!", but my work ethic coming out and keeping me on task until my expected workload was actually complete. But even then I don't think I went beyond 45 hours in a week in my time there as an employee. And I didn't work on a weekend even once. If something really hadn't gotten done in what I felt like was a reasonable work week, I would have let it slide. That may have happened once, but only once. Making the proprietary company build system do things it wasn't precisely designed to do ... well, I just can't talk about it, since I don't swear in public posts. ;)
- pc86 11y ago
  > FWIW, I do consider myself 10x. Shocking.