Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

I concur. I've demonstrated that I'm a 10x+ full-stack programmer several times in my career, but I've met at least a few people who could bang out code better than me. I can design complicated systems with many moving parts to solve difficult business problems, and hand them off to someone else to manage with minimal maintenance. I've done it many times. However, I worked with one young guy who understood Ruby better at age 25 than I ever will. But then it came time to log into the server and do something, and he didn't even know how to open a terminal and SSH into the box! So, no, I don't believe a simple coding test will find people who are "10x" in software development. There's a lot more to it than just writing lines of code.

View on HN

> he didn't even know how to open a terminal and SSH into the box!

You just described something which is trivial to learn in less than one minute. This lack of experience does not directly speak to their skills or abilities.

Extending your example to illustrate its irrelevance, were I to have spent 60 seconds with this engineer alone just before your little ssh test, he would still appear to be a 10x engineer to you.

Focus more on ability and less on what one has or hasn't seen just yet in their careers. I could easily find the limits to your knowledge in seconds and I'm quite sure you could return the favor. I'd gladly hire someone who demonstrates the ability to become a wizard in X and not care in the slightest if they've seen Y and Z yet. I can teach Y and Z to someone like that very easily.

Yes, but: a programmer who has made it to age 25 without learning how to ssh into a server where their code will end up running is to me demonstrating that they are remarkably incurious about the larger ecosystem within which they’re working. One sign of a better developer is that their horizons are broader.

Seeing that I write code everyday now that will end up running on Linux Firecracker MicroVMs that I will never have SSH access to…

The “ecosystem” of development is very large. I’m sure there are parts of the ecosystem that others would know that you wouldn’t.

Or they’ve only worked at BigCo with defined production pipelines and connecting to individual EC2 instances isn’t possible without jumping through incredible month-long hoops, and not available for production at all.

I am not able to ssh into any production instance I’ve deployed. I know how I would but it’s just not organizationally allowed.

When you see someone who doesn't know how to open a terminal, and log into a server at the command, you can assume they also don't know much about networking, DNS, firewalls, shell scripting commands, or how to configure the services upon which the application's stack runs, like web servers, application servers, caching services, or even databases. You're right; it's trivial to teach that one thing, but that particular one thing implies a learning gap about a lot of other things.

> When you see someone who doesn't know how to open a terminal, and log into a server at the command

Maybe this person doesn't quite get how to properly not use a comma between dependent clauses. How could one trust this person to communicate well?

> networking, DNS, firewalls, shell scripting commands, or how to configure the services upon which the application's stack runs, like web servers, application servers, caching services, or even databases...

I have known plenty of gainfully employed, 25-year-old software engineers who didn't have experience with each item on this list. That's perfectly fine; it's easy to teach in one brown-bag lunch session. I'll still take the wizard because those innate abilities can't be taught.

Just reading along, but man, your comment annoyed me at how unconstructive it was. Jeez.

the irony is going to make my head explode

> it's easy to teach in one brown-bag lunch session

You can teach "networking, DNS, firewalls, shell scripting commands, or how to configure the services upon which the application's stack runs" in a day? This is "Teach yourself C++ in 21 days"-type of stuff.

At any rate, I didn't read that it's not "fine" in TheRealDunkirk's comment. They were just saying that people can have wildly varying skill-sets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com