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Comment by didgetmaster | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does. Too often, management will focus more on the guy who works 12 hour days to accomplish 8 hours of real work than the guy who gets the same thing accomplished in an 8 hour day. Also, deviations from 'normal' are frowned upon. Taking time to improve the process isn't built into the schedule; so taking time to build a wheelbarrow is discouraged when they think you could be hauling buckets faster instead.

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>It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does

I'd be happier if industry cares more for team productivity - I have witnessed how rewarding "10x" individuals may lead to perverse results on a wider scale, a la Cobra Effect. In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs quickly, but would create multiple smaller bugs and regressions for the 1x developers to fix while he moved to the next big problem worthy of his attention. Everyone else ended up being 0.7x - which made the curse of an engineer look even more productive comparatively!

Because he was allowed to break the rules, there was a growing portion of the codebase that only he could work on - while it wasn't Rust, imagine an org has a "No Unsafe Rust" rule that is optional to 1 guy. Organizations ought to be very careful how they measure productivity, and should certainly look beyond first-order metrics.

> In one insidious case, our management-enabled, long-tenured "10x" rockstar fixed all the big customer-facing bugs quickly, but would create multiple smaller bugs and regressions for the 1x developers to fix while he moved to the next big problem worthy of his attention. Everyone else ended up being 0.7x - which made the curse of an engineer look even more productive comparatively! Because he was allowed to break the rules,

bingo, well said. Worked on a team like this with a “principal” engineer who’d work very fast with bug-ridden work like this simply because he had the automatic blessing from on high to do whatever he wanted. My unfortunate task was to run along behind him and clean up, which to my credit I think I did a pretty good job at, but of course these types can only very rarely acknowledge/appreciate that.

Eventually he got super insecure/threatened and attempted to push me out along with whoever else he felt was a threat to his fiefdom.

What happened to him in the end?

I don’t know, eventually the working environment got too toxic and I along with two other senior engineers quit. As far as I know he’s still running his little kingdom.

I try to look at these things through the lens of “software literacy” - software is a form of literacy and this story might be better viewed as “a bunch of illiterate managers are impressed with one good writer at the encyclopdia publishers, now it turns out this guy makes mistakes, but hey, what do you expect when the management cannot read or write !”

Sure. A cohesive team of employees who stick together for more than 2 years is so rare. They can be so much more productive than a group of talented people who rotate a new person in and out every 3-6 months.

This reminds me of the "Parable of the Two Programmers." [1] A story about what happens to a brilliant developer given an identical task to a mediocre developer.

[1] I preserved a copy of it on my (no-advertising or monetization) blog here: https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-pro...

I had an idea once but when I tried to explain it people didn't understand.

I revisited earlier thought: communication is a 2 man job, one is to not make an effort to understand while the other explains things poorly. It always manages to never work out.

Periodically I thought about the puzzle and was eventually able to explain it such that people thought it was brilliant ~ tho much to complex to execute.

I thought about it some more, years went by and I eventually managed to make it easy to understand. The response: "If it was that simple someone else would have thought of it." I still find it hilarious decades later.

It pops to mind often when I rewrite some code and it goes from almost unreadable to something simple and elegant. Ah, this must be how someone else would have done it!

> Ah, this must be how someone else would have done it!

This is a good exclamation :D

And it's a poignant story. Thanks for sharing.

That’s pretty good. It needs an Athena poster :-)

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

― Abraham Lincoln

I have started to follow this 'lately' (for a decade) and it has worked miracles. As for the anxious managers/clients, I keep them updated of the design/documentation/though process, mentioning the risks of the path-not-taken, and that maintain their peace of mind. But this depends heavily on the client and the managers.

I can't seem to find it in a google search, maybe I'm just recalling entirely the wrong terms.

In the early computing era there was a competition. Something like take some input and produce an output. One programmer made a large program in (IIRC) Fortran with complex specifications documentation etc. The other used shell pipes, sort, and a small handful or two of other programs in a pipeline to accomplish the same task in like 10 developer min.

The Knuth link in the sibling comment is an original, but you're probably thinking of "The Tao of Programming"

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html

"""“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”"""

There was also the "Hadoop vs. unix pipeline running on a laptop"-story a few years back, a more modern take: https://adamdrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-...

Bash-Reduce: https://github.com/sorhus/bash-reduce

Sounds like "Knuth vs McIlroy", which has been discussed on hn and elsewhere before, and the general take is that it was somewhat unfair to Knuth.

[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/BentleyEtAl8... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+vs+mcilroy

This is the competition I was thinking of. I must have read it in a dead-image PDF version some other time on HN. This paper isn't the one I recall but the solution is exactly the sort I vaguely recalled.

I'm trying to copy-in the program as it might have existed, with some obvious updates to work in today's shells ...

  #!/bin/sh
  tr -cs A-Za-z '
  ' "${2:-/dev/stdin}" |\
  tr A-Z a-z |\
  sort |\
  uniq -c |\
  sort -rn |\
  sed ${1:-100}q

Alternately (escapes not yet tested) $ tr -cs A-Za-z \012 "${INPUTFILEHERE:-/dev/stdin}" | tr A-Z a-z | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | sed ${MAXWORDSHERE:-100}q

Edited: Removed some errors likely induced by OCR / me not catching that in the initial transcription from the browser view of the file.

Just to be clear, it was not a competition. For more, please follow the links from some of the previous HN discussions, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31301777.

[For those who may not follow all the links: Bentley asked Knuth to write a program in Pascal (WEB) to illustrate literate programming—i.e. explaining a long complicated program—and so Knuth wrote a beautiful program with a custom data structure (hash-packed tries). Bentley then asked McIlroy to review the program. In the second half of the review, McIlroy (the inventor of Unix pipes) questioned the problem itself (the idea of writing a program for scratch), and used the opportunity to evangelize Unix and Unix pipes (at the time not widely known or available).]

I was both of those developers at different times, at least metaphorically.

I drank from the OO koolaid at one point. I was really into building things up using OOD and creating extensible, flexible code to accomplish everything.

And when I showed some code I'd written to my brother, he (rightly) scoffed and said that should have been 2-3 lines of shell script.

And I was enlightened. ;)

Like, I seriously rebuilt my programming philosophy practically from the ground up after that one comment. It's cool having a really smart brother, even if he's younger than me. :)

This is unrelated to the excellent story, but it's annoying that the repost has the following "correction":

> The manager of Charles has by now [become] tired of seeing him goof off.

"The manager has tired of Charles" is as correct as "the manager has become tired of Charles". To tire is a verb. The square bracket correction is unnecessary and arguably makes the sentence worse.

Sure enough. Presumably my brain was switched off if I added that "correction" myself.

Or it was already there in whatever source I managed to copy it from. No idea.

Without more backup I can only describe that as being fiction. Righteous fiction, where the good guy gets downtrodden and the bad guy wins to fuel the reader's resentment.

It's practically my life experience.

Sometimes I'm appreciated, and managers actually realize what they have when I create something for them. Frequently I accomplish borderline miracles and a manager will look at me and say, "OK, what about this other thing?"

My first job out of college, I was working for a company run by a guy who said to me, "Programmers are a dime a dozen."

He also said to me, after I quit, after his client refused to give him any more work unless he guaranteed that I was the lead developer on it, "I can't believe you quit." I simply shrugged and thought, "Maybe you shouldn't have treated me like crap, including not even matching the other offer I got."

I've also made quite a lot of money "Rescuing Small Companies From Code Disasters. (TM)" ;) Yes, that's my catch phrase. So I've seen the messes that teams often create.

The "incompetent" team code description in the story is practically prescient. I've seen the results of exactly that kind of management and team a dozen times. Things that, given the same project description, I could have created in 1/100 the code and with much more overall flexibility. I've literally thrown out entire projects like that and replaced them with the much smaller, tighter, and faster code that does more than the original project.

So all I can say is: Find better teams to work with if you think this is fiction. This resonates with me because it contains industry Truth.

To me it is a story about managers clueless about the work. You can make all the effort in the world to imagine doing something but the taste of the soup is in the eating. I do very simple physical grunt work for a living, there it is much more obvious that it is impossible. It's truly hilarious.

They probably deserve more praise when they do guess correctly but would anyone really know when it happens?

That’s because most executives can’t understand technology deeply enough to know the difference.

Even when they are smart enough to know, they seem to have very short memories. While I don't consider myself to be a 10x engineer; I have certainly done a number of 10x things over my career.

I worked for a company where I almost single handedly built a product that resulted in tens of millions of dollars in sales. I got a nice 'atta boy' for it, but my future ideas were often overridden by someone in management who 'knew better'. After the management changed, I found myself in a downsizing event once I started criticizing them for a lack of innovation.

This is the sad part of it, many people without core competence end up in "leadership" positions and remove any "perceived" threats to their authority. I believe part of it is due to the absence of leadership training in the engineering curriculum. Colleges should encourage engineers to take up few leadership courses and get them trained on things like Influence and Power.

Knowing the difference between an overly ambitious or technically wrong proposal and when to listen to the engineer seems impossible at times. Perhaps it requires a consultant.

In my experience working for several companies, people who know and are not merely acting out of fear can call things out and explain why something is wrong or ambitious. And more often than not sensible engineers get it. Consultants are usually called in by the leadership when they can't deal with the backlash or have no core competence in the first place.

Reminds me of the inventer of the blue LED (see recent veritasium video)

Did you go build your own company? You totally should with a story like that.

As a matter of fact, I did.

https://www.didgets.com

And this is the single biggest reason why good developers become managers.

It's almost impossible to get executives to think in return on equity (“RoE”) for the future instead of “costs” measured in dollars and cents last quarter.

Which is weird, since so many executives are working in a VC-funded environment, and internal work should be “venture funded” as well.

> It seems like the industry would get a lot more 10x behavior if it was recognized and rewarded more often than it currently does.

I don't agree with that, there are a _lot_ of completely crap developers and they get put into positions where even the ones capable of doing so aren't allowed to because it's not on a ticket.

I've seen some thing.

"Don't confuse motion with action", in other words. I think a lot of people aren't good at it because they themselves are rewarded for the opposite. This seems rife in the "just above individual contributor" management layer, but that's a biased take.

Honestly? You work at a place a manager hasn't heard "impact" yet? I thought managers at this point just walk around the office saying "impact".

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