[eckesicle]

These sort of stories seem to be dime a dozen and weirdly celebrated around HN and the software engineering community.

We’re told of the hero, who goes against their managers and executives and doesn’t deliver any stories as agreed in sprints.

We’re told of the engineer who isn’t hired by Google because he can’t invert a binary tree. Everyone else piles on and decree that, yes indeed, you cannot measure developer efficiency with a Leetcode or whiteboard problem. We’re too good for that. Another engineer chimes in: “I don’t test my candidates. The best people I worked with were hired over a beer and a chat at the local pub”

We’re told of the MBAs who destroy the organisation, by introducing evil metrics, and how that the work we do are immeasurable and that the PHBs don’t understand how great we are. 10x engineers aren’t a real thing, everyone is equally productive in our digital utopia.

Meanwhile in the real world, hordes of awful engineers deliver no story points, because they in fact, do nothing and only waste time and lowers morale.

Meanwhile in the real world, each job opportunity has thousands of applicants who can barely write a for loop. Leetcode and whiteboards filter these people out effectively every day.

Meanwhile in the real world, metrics on delivery, features and bugs drive company growth and success for those companies that employ them.

To me, all these heroes, and above process people, just strike me as difficult to work with narcissists who are poor at communication. We are not special, and we do not sit above every other department in our organisation.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> We’re told of the hero, who goes against their managers and executives and doesn’t deliver any stories

> Meanwhile in the real world, hordes of awful engineers deliver no story points

Do you think the point here is that not delivering on one specific metric is a good thing, or that not delivering one specific metric can't be assumed to be the whole picture?

[eckesicle]

It’s the latter, but my point is that’s a tired and weak argument to make.

The blog poster could’ve asked, why does the manager want me to deliver the story points? It’s because Jake is also delivering zero story points and he’s a terrible engineer and it’s a good canary metric.

[dilyevsky]

Agree in 1st and 2nd “meanwhile”. On the metrics thing though I have the opposite experience - mild distraction at best, total disaster and productivity killer at worst. Most orgs couldn’t even implement metrics fully (or at all) because in reality it is always much more work than they usually anticipate. Instead they larp as google and waste your god damn time.

Having said that i do think that there are a bunch of senior folks who think they are Tim but meanwhile they’re just hiding their laziness/incompetence by getting involved in other people’s shit

[Planktonne]

> We’re told of the engineer who isn’t hired by Google because he can’t invert a binary tree.

>Meanwhile in the real world, hordes of awful engineers deliver no story points

These two seem linked; if hiring practices are bad, then you would expect to end up with many bad hired developers.

[cratermoon]

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

[mjburgess]

People of a revolutionary (or "innovative") temperament are those who are going to say, "this system doesnt work, these processes are broken, the wrong outcomes arise" and ignore them. In doing so they just "do the right thing" in their judgement, and in so doing, develop the next iteration on the processes that others will follow.

If these innovators are operating in a niche where innovation is required, they are solving different problems than most others and have different self-defined standards ("narcissism"), and so on.

Probably many people who visit HN have this temperament, and a significant number are in niches which need to evolve this way (eg., this applies to all startups). HN is a small sample of engineers: most don't go to websites to conceptualise their own activity, reflect, etc. These are indications of people with a desire to innovate, or to solve novel problems in their profession.

If you are in a highly stable environment, with effective processes, etc. then people of this temperament can be trouble if left entirely to their own devices: good managmenet would place them in projects/areas where there is some unknown unknowns to figure out.

In many cases however, people without this temperament (say, "it works, dont break it, conservatives") find this behaviour unsettling, arrogant, disruptive, isolating -- because it is. There isn't any thing to "communicate" when you havent figured out what the solution is -- you can air your thought process every day, but that will just unsettle more people when they see how much it changes (in response to more thkning, information, etc.). And the values by which this change takes place are not conservative, they're radical and imposed by a person who sees a route out of a predicament and so on. It's quite arrogant to place yourself in that position, or think it's yours by some invisible duty that no one else has.

In any case, if you operate in this niche, esp. eg., if you're in a start up environment -- then you arent going to care a jot about this "real world". They are acting against the real world, to improve it.

[eckesicle]

Thanks for responding. I see your point, but I think it is responding to something slightly different than the point I was making.

If I may latch on to your first paragraph, my point is that we are saying this first bit “this system is broken” and are happy to throw out the baby with the bath water and tear it all apart, on flimsy evidence and generalisations.

And yes, there’s definitely something to be said about the HN crowd having a temperament toward innovation, but I don’t think that’s in any way orthogonal to my point. In fact, this community is far more rational than most others, so I would sort of expect us to rationally look at company processes too, but for some reason we seem to have a blind spot when it comes to our managers and executives and the ‘horrors and hoops’ they make us jump through every day.

[MichaelRo]

>> To me, all these heroes, and above process people, just strike me as difficult to work with narcissists who are poor at communication. We are not special, and we do not sit above every other department in our organisation.

Exactly.

Looks to me like Tim was really good at hiding his incompetence behind other people's backs. Also looks like a problem of the others, particularly senior others of not telling him "Fuck off, Timmy" when he sat uninvited beside them to "pair program" together.

[Kamq]

So on one hand, you're kinda right. HN is filled with exaggeration (imo often justified) from people venting because they have to deal with the bad parts of this system all day. That seems natural in a dev filled space.

But I don't think your comment is fair.

> We’re told of the engineer who isn’t hired by Google because he can’t invert a binary tree. Everyone else piles on and decree that, yes indeed, you cannot measure developer efficiency with a Leetcode or whiteboard problem.

Because this is a bad way to judge engineers. Or, rather, it's a great way if they don't know how to invert a binary tree. Most of the job is to figure out something you don't know yet and do it. Giving an engineer a random wikipedia page on an obscure algorithm and having them implement it is a great interview tactic. Having them regurgitate something common is bad, there will be a function for it somewhere, and you just need to call it.

> Meanwhile in the real world, hordes of awful engineers deliver no story points, because they in fact, do nothing and only waste time and lowers morale.

I agree with you on this one. Those people need to be fired. That doesn't mean story points are a good metric, often 90% of long term value can come from the kind of people who are like Tim, and losing them can destroy projects. Just because something bad is happening, it doesn't justify killing 90% of value for a team.

The only thing I've seen that works is to give team managers more discretion and rigorously fire managers who regularly create poor preforming teams (you often have to bump manager pay for this, that's fine, good managers are worth their weight in gold).

> Meanwhile in the real world, each job opportunity has thousands of applicants who can barely write a for loop. Leetcode and whiteboards filter these people out effectively every day.

You do need to filter for people that can code. That doesn't mean filtering for inverting binary trees is a good idea. Having people submit code samples that they're proud of is a much better approach for a first filter.

> Meanwhile in the real world, metrics on delivery, features and bugs drive company growth and success for those companies that employ them.

Bullshit. Basically all companies use metrics, and most companies are garbage at delivering useful software. A company being years behind and a million over budget on a software project, and eventually delivering something people don't want is so cliche that it's expected. And these companies regularly get out competed by small teams using 1% of the resources, as long as the small teams give half of a shit. In fact, if you want my metric for team success, what percentage of the team actually cares is a good one.

You're proposing a solution with a <20% success rate. Don't act like it's a gold standard that drives business value to new heights. With the system as it is today, most companies would be better off getting out of software and having a third party do it for them.

[eckesicle]

My wider point is not that the way companies are run is perfect and that we should stop the “innovators” (to quote the sibling comment). Each of these examples speak of corporate dysfunction, but we never give any weight to the constraints that force them in place. Leetcode is bad, but it’s bad in the sense that it errs too heavily on filtering out false negatives - the cheaper of the two errors. The alternative is worse.

Giving Tim the benefit of the doubt in this story, it still holds true that for every extraordinary and invisible superstar like Tim there are 99 under-performers who are indistinguishable from him.

We need to empathise with our managers and the processes in our organisations to understand their purpose and how they came to be.

We, software engineers, keep picking out singular data points of evidence to point at a flawed and unfair world, that go against our self inflated egos.

The brew guy inverting the binary tree and Tim being great, does not invalidate the practices of whiteboards and story points as a general practice.

To your final point, the best organisations that I’ve worked with used metrics in a very effective way (mostly in start ups). The worst did too. Just because some do it poorly, does not mean that it’s bad across the board.

What is tiring, is the unfair, and low expectation of the quality of evidence demanded of the anti-establishment notions in software development, before they are taken as gospel by this community.

And, in my experience, the people who are the strongest proponents of sidestepping or dismantling these processes overlap strongly with those who also do not deliver value to their teams.

[Kamq]

> Leetcode is bad, but it’s bad in the sense that it errs too heavily on filtering out false negatives

But, it doesn't. It filters for something orthogonal to development, which is ability to obsess over clever algorithmic solutions. Ok, well my company does HackerRank instead of LeetCode, maybe LeetCode is magically better, but I'm not seeing anything that tells me someone who grinds LeetCode is actually going to be useful on my team.

Look, you want an idiot check to make sure someone is actually able to code, fine. That's probably a good idea. But the number of stories on here about people being turned away because they hadn't run into a particular tricky algorithm problem is concerning.

> Giving Tim the benefit of the doubt in this story, it still holds true that for every extraordinary and invisible superstar like Tim there are 99 under-performers who are indistinguishable from him.

But they aren't indistinguishable. The author of the blog post was perfectly able to distinguish them. That's my point. There are plenty of ways to be able to distinguish them, this metric just isn't one of them. Because it's a bad metric.

It may not be legible to the higher ups, but good lower level managers have no problem distinguishing good unconventional people, and under-performers.

> We need to empathise with our managers and the processes in our organisations to understand their purpose and how they came to be.

I do empathize with the managers, at least the lower level ones. That's why I advocated for putting them in complete control and giving them unilateral firing privileges and increasing their pay.

> the best organisations that I’ve worked with used metrics in a very effective way (mostly in start ups). The worst did too.

You're really making it sound like metrics (at least as traditionally practiced in software) are orthogonal to being a good organization. If that's true, we might want to re-think how much time we spend on them and how much money we spend capturing them.

Now, if you want to use profit, adoption, or user satisfaction as metrics, I'd love to talk about that, but I've seen nothing in my experience in the corporate world that tells me that the way we're currently using them is even net positive value.

[eckesicle]

It only appears that HackerRank/Leetcode isn’t good at filtering because you’re viewing it from your perspective, and not the perspective of the entire population that is tested. To you, the predictive power at the top tail end of the distribution is low, because you’re thinking of two strong developers Alice and Bob. Alice happens to know algorithm X and would pass the test, whereas Bob does not. But that’s not the population we’re testing. Think more along the lines of Alice and Bob and your grandmother were the test population. It’s absolutely fantastic at filtering the lower 95% of applicants because they will _never_ be able to pass. Yes, inadvertently 2.5% of “good developers” are filtered too, but that doesn’t matter to the outcome of your company. They just want someone competent, and they don’t care if it’s Alice or Bob.

The same logic sort of applies to Tim and his performance. The bias of having an imperfect metric is probably much better than the bias of letting an army of middle managers go with their cut. Besides, it doesn’t have to be a hard filtering function at this stage, but a metric to indicate that we need to look a little closer at Tim

[Kamq]

> It’s absolutely fantastic at filtering the lower 95% of applicants because they will _never_ be able to pass.

This is the part I disagree with. It hasn't been true for years. Anyone with the free version of ChatGPT can pass a hacker rank today.

> but that doesn’t matter to the outcome of your company

It does for mine, because we've hired all of the good developers that get through the process you're describing and it isn't enough. We actively moved away from what you're describing and turned the interview into a 2-3 hour pair programming session where the person completes a mini version of a ticket.

This has much more predictive power than what you're describing.

[eckesicle]

> This is the part I disagree with. It hasn't been true for years. Anyone with the free version of ChatGPT can pass a hacker rank today.

It certainly still is true today. Anybody who is sufficiently motivated to cheat can pass it. It was true prior to ChatGPT, and it still remains true today. And yet they don’t. Most people completely fail these screens

> It does for mine, because we've hired all of the good developers that get through the process you're describing and it isn't enough.

Then your industry is atypical in the type of applicants that you are getting. So to accommodate you’ve had to increase your false positives to reduce false negatives. That’s completely fine if it’s what you need to do, but it’s not the typical experience for a tech company.

We also do a pair screen after the code test and we still reject around 80% who make it to that stage. How do you scale interviewing everyone if you don’t pre screen?