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Comment by jackblemming | Hacker News Reader

Imo great engineers produce a lot of good to great quality work fast. They care about the big picture and get involved with the actual domain they're working in. They see code reuse opportunities and friction company wide vs only whatever team they're on. Great software engineers will write tools, packages, and guidelines that the entire company can use- not just their small team. They know how to standup to management and produce quality work that users actually want.

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I like to think a great engineer is also not afraid to write some iffy code in 1/10 the time if it solves 90% of the problem and not be bothered by the code being not to pretty.

The trick is to know the bounded context of the "iffy-ness". Iffy code that might occasionally lead to latency or a timeout for some users using your service, is different from iffy code that charges the user the wrong dollar amount at checkout, or iffy code that could brick a user's device. Great engineers know which things are safe (enough) to take what types of shortcuts on.

> Imo great engineers produce a lot of good to great quality work fast

Sounds awfully like the Myth of the 10x Engineer.

Not quite that high, but you'd be silly to believe there's no difference in speed at all.

It can be that high. It's not the number of lines of code produced but the value/utility created. A great engineer can actually make the same product in X days where it takes an average developer 10X days to come up with the same. The better engineer might (and in most cases, would) have written less code.

Yes it can be that high depending on _how you're measuring_. I think this is why the myth has gone on for a long time. It also greatly depends on who you're comparing. Are you comparing Peter Norvig to a 1st year undergraduate, or someone on Peter's team who has around the same experience and skillset?

But I don't want to derail the thread ;)

Fair enough, but the problem is you can't always find a team full of people "who has around the same experience and skillset as Peter Norvig".

That's basically what "The Mythical Man-Month" (the origin of the 10x developer) says: "Always recruit star programmers if you can, but most of the time you can't. Therefore learn how to best utilise the average ones."

Indeed, "a lot of good to great quality work fast" smells a bit of "SLOC per day" count.

"SLOC per day" is the opposite of productivity: terrible developers can produce tons of bloated and unnecessary code.

+1 - Lines of Code mean very little, I'd rather see the impact that work produces.

"It's easy, just be John Carmack!"

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