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Comment by palisade | Hacker News Reader

4. The Savant: Also known as the absent minded professor. You could throw questions at this person in an interview and they will seem completely inadequate and unprepared. But, then apply them to a problem on the job and like a juggernaut they will defeat any obstacle. They will even solve problems your best engineers have been struggling with for years without breaking a sweat. A lot of companies make the mistake of weeding this type of engineer out in the interview process.

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5. The HN Commentor. This species carries an inflated sense of self worth and uses many opportunities to tell others. Tends to blame shortcomings on others rather than accepting responsibility for own faults.

Hit the nail on the head - and as usual when that happens around here, people reach for the down-arrow.

Upvote/downvote mechanisms always drown out unpopular truths.

That’s my wife (and she actually works at one of the big tech companies).

Try and talk to her about tech and you won’t get much out of it. At home she watches Netflix and does her nails. No HN, Reddit or anything. No conferences.

Tell her she needs to learn language X and tools Y and Z and she’ll master it in a week. She’ll deliver 10x what everyone in the team does. Top performer in no time.

I can’t really wrap my head around it. I’m your typical tech enthusiast always here on HN, coding on my own time, etc. And yet if we were on the same team I’m sure she’d be orders of magnitude more productive than me. Which can be seen by the fact she makes almost twice what I make (am also an SDE at a large company), and is at a higher level despite starting 2 years later than me.

Presumably you're spending your free time following your interests and passions, which have some overlap with your work.

Sounds like she follows the needs of her job. The tangential, part-overlap enthusiast is always going to get toasted by the person going full on what's needed.

It might well be that, I've run into a few people with the ability to ruthlessly focus on the problem at hand often by reframing the problem in a way that people didn't expect.

A couple of them where so far ahead of me it was like teaming up with a different species.

I don't buy the 10x developer stuff but I'd certainly put them in the 1.5x-2x category, We ended up working well together though I'd naturally take the "flesh this out, make it bullet proof, document it" side and they'd do the more creative part (it's not that I couldn't do it as well, it was just they'd do that in half the time).

I learnt a lot working with them.

10x is real, and the way it is achieved is by making a key insight which results in requiring only 10% of the work to be done to get the required results. The actual work then gets done at the normal 1x rate.

This of course is impossible at companies which don't allow the flexibility for these people to stretch their wings. A big part of increasing a company's productivity is giving everyone the possibility to do this so you can uncover those hidden 10x-ers and put them in architectural roles.

Sometimes is just making the mental work 10 times faster, e.g. evaluating the possibility space 10 times faster. There are people with brains running at 1 GHz and also people with brains running at 100 MHz. Although, having a faster brain is not good "per se"

I'm not convinced that churning out the same solution 10x faster than average is possible. 3x yes. But the 10x comes from doing less work to achieve the same results.

if by "work" you mean writing code, that's a small part of what I'm referring to. 10x faster is the speed at which the possibility space is scanned.

I don't buy the 10x developer stuff... 1.5x-2x category

Closer to 2.5x, if you're comparing best to median. 10x is comparing best to worst, and that's very believable.

A 2nd edition of Peopleware summarises it; the 10x programmer is not a myth, but it's comparing the best to the worst; NOT best to median. It's also not about programming specifically; it's simply a common distribution in many metrics of performance.

The rule of thumb Peopleware states is that you can rely on the best outperforming the worst by a factor of 10, and you can rely on the best outperforming the median by a factor of 2.5. This of course indicates that a median developer, middle of the pack, is a 4x developer. Obviously, this is a statistical rule, and if you've got a tiny sample size or some kind of singular outlier or other such; well, we're all adults and we understand how statistics and distributions work.

Peopleware uses Boehn (1981), Sackman (1968), Augustine (1979) and Lawrence (1981) as its sources. [ "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister, 1987, p45 ]

I mean conferences are about socialization primary and HN+reddit are mostly pop. Reading HN is not learning for job nor makes me better at work stuff.

Also an idea: maybe she is fast because she has rest and downtime. We are more productive when we are not working all the time and have rest.

I was just illustrating a point. She’s not an enthusiast at all. Software is strictly her job and she’s doesn’t care about it outside of work.

It baffles me because my initial reaction to someone like that is to think they’re not good. But she’s really good. She’s able to pick things up on the job fast and is extremely focused on her work. I OTOH always need to use my personal time to learn things and have trouble focusing, despite being a tech enthusiast.

I did not said she is enthusiast. I think that many of those "enthusiast" activities are not making you better at the job if you think about it. Focused learning with goal is very often more effective then just playing with something and rest+downtime+change of activity really help with learning and effectivity on the job.

But, I think that since she is "extermly focused on job" she probably likes (or at least does not hate) the job itself - not pop version of what programer should like or random messing with gadgets, but the job itself. Many people are like that - they are able to like many different things, so they like what they are doing now.

I find a lot of interesting, neat articles on HN. Occasionally but rarely something worth talking to coworkers about.

Not once can I recall reading something on HN I had no experience with an being able to use that at work without doing a lot of additional research. In terms of time spent and career impact HN is on the same level as Reddit, which is a net negative.

Conferences aren't necessarily a net negative but who wants to spend 2-3 days going to talks and all the after party stuff (which is where real career progress is made) to get one or two solid technical bits? Especially when those will be available a week later in countless blog recaps?

On HN, etc: I was just illustrating a point. She’s not an enthusiast at all. Software is strictly her job and she’s doesn’t care about it outside of work.

I may qualify in this category. Companies reject me because I gave them a brute force solution for finding repeated values in an array. But there hasn't been any single instance with my current job that I couldn't check all of the requirements that were assigned to me, even those which I thought I wasn't prepared for. The hiring/evaluating process needs to get refined.

To me this screams "justifying why I failed an interview". Maybe you're not a savant, maybe you're just terrible at working under pressure. Most people are - but it's a skill you should learn like any other.

oooh this sounds familiar. Might be me :)

yeah been weeded out a few times. and left some really interesting solutions at past jobs. When I get exhausted though I need breaks.. Flip side, it's way too easy to get obsessed over the wrong kind of solution too ... I LOVE working with QA teams and competent management because they'll usually spot this before I will!

I'm very happy in my current company.

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