9 karma · joined March 29, 2012
UPDATE: did that myself, but wish someone takes over. I only check for new and better stuff once in 3 years. The community deserves someone better.
Yet here is what we can do that pg did not mention. I shall tech my daughters. Thank you code.org.
Unlike me most of the crowd here don't have kids yet, I guess. But day will come and you will. Half will be girls. They'll see you from up close. They will hear your battle stories. There will be no better role model than you.
Yes one generation is a lot in internet years. But status quo never changes quickly. At least we can personally can see to it that it does change
I am not that person. I am an average guy. I meet devs 3x my inferior, and 3x my superior. So I do think 10x range that MMM talks about is possible.
My second problem with the article is unit of measurement question. It is very clear what it is. A time to completion of a well defined task by an individual developer, with predetermined level of quality of the result. The problem is in the measurement. To measure you have to waste resources giving same task to many. And quality measurements are imprecise. MMM book was all about the time to completion. Obviously nobody counts lines of code. Why even bringing it up?
While I think 9x range is possible, I have never seen it in real life medium size teams. (I am a short term projects freelancer, so I see two companies a year over last 18 years) The reason being, my theory goes, a contextual one. Start-ups ship buggy code fast. A fab automation company might test a released code for a year before shipping. I believe it isn't the issue of A players hiring A players and B players hiring C players. It's just the goals differ. I was faster than most at a certain client of mine, but my code was less reliable. That was fine for a specific task I was hired for, but not for most what they do.
My third problem is that the article tries to fight the notion of importance of hiring 10xers. In many cases individual performance meters less. Imperfectly studied as it might be, 10x performance measurability beats other metrics of what makes a good developer, and a good employee. How do you measure ability to communicate, motivational power, leadership, and plain good taste? So for established companies 10x hiring is not as critical. And yet, I can clearly see why start-ups are focused on 10xers (ninjas etc). In start-ups individual devs have more autonomy, by design. Winner-takes-most aspect requires short time to market. Delivery times matter much more then quality. That being the case, hiring an obnoxious jerk who codes like hell makes clear if perhaps a temporary benefit.
So if you agree that for a startup time to market is a key, and individual developer relative importance is high, a logical conclusion is makes sense to search for (and overpay) the best. Just like it makes sense to fire 10xers once startup gets traction and replace with normally paid, normally performing guys that function great as a team.
Details: To read HN more conveniently both on desktops and on iPad I would like to have fewer headings per page, have them in larger font etc, I am writing my own, magazine like (or Flipboard like) HTML viewer. I don't want the data from HN to travel via my server, fetching it directly from the browser.
However fetching RSS from the client side, at least on Chrome, and going forward on any modern browser, would require obtaining permission from the Cross Domain site. Currently RSS returns none. Chrome reports error, will not allow JavaScript code to process. For the development purposes I fake it via proxy (Fiddler2) but once coded it would either require RSS returning the right header, or me channeling this request via my server (Google App Engine)
Since the point of having RSS is to publish it to other services, I presume you would not object to such use of your data. If you do, please let me know and I'll stop.
I plant to make HTML/JS/CSS open sourced once it is done.
Contact: Michael Kariv michael_kariv@yahoo.com