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by PragmaticPulp
2311 days ago
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> It comes from terrible "corporate drone" software developers in the 80s and 90s - the ones that would takes weeks to developer simple routines. Ironically, a lot of the 0.1X engineers I've worked with in the 2010s were the most technically competent. Obsession with cutting-edge tools and being technically correct over shipping quickly can sink a person's productivity. They're the people leading the charge to rewrite the front-end in Vue after we already rewrote it in React when Angular fell out of style. Or rewriting the backend in Rust because Golang isn't trendy any more. Or refactoring the backend for months to increase test coverage from 93% to 95%. My personal indicator of a 10X programmer is someone who knows when and how to trade off technical debt against speed of execution. A brilliant engineer with all of the knowledge in the world can still sink a team by working on the wrong things all the time. |
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From HN comments, I get the impression that this is a common problem at companies like Uber. Lots of smart engineers with great technical talent, but they spend all their time making pet apps and services which satiate their interest in and excitement towards programming/engineering, but which have not much direct relation to the actual product or any other ultimate business objectives. If there is any relation, it's indirection upon indirection. I imagine this is probably because the core product is so narrowly-focused and basically "done" that they have to look for any other way to spend their time and energy without getting bored and demotivated.
I would guess this happens at a lot of companies with single, simple (from the user's perspective), narrowly-focused products, like Twitter.