Comment by ungreased0675

Comment by ungreased0675 10 days ago

12 replies

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I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process. This guy is one more piece of evidence. He knew what hiring managers wanted to hear, and used that to get in the door.

My advice to companies is to stop chasing unicorns and 10x engineers. Intentionally try to hire ordinary average engineers. Your company making a SaaS app doesn’t need talented programmers, it just needs ordinary ones.

Ego leads founders to chase top 1% talent in some cases. In other cases the product is terrible but they think hiring an amazing programmer will pull them out of the dive. It won’t. Just hire normal people and build normally.

markus_zhang 9 days ago

My advice to companies who wants to hire 10x programmers is always:

Either pick someone inside who really wants the job, or find a brilliant new graduate who really wants the job.

It’s usually safer and cheaper.

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joshuanapoli 9 days ago

There is obviously some distribution of productivity in software developers. In young startups, a highly productive developer has an outsized impact. A delay in product development can mean the company is entirely blocked from advancing its growth. The cost of a “slow” developer can become the entire burn rate of the company, as everyone waits for X to be finished. A more productive developer has a better chance of staying ahead of the critical path.

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  • davidgerard 8 days ago

    One effect is a fresh set of eyes. When I started my last job I immediately reorganised a pile of stuff in useful ways just based on my previous job - which made up for not knowing anything about the local lay of the land as yet. It can give your first few months a real perception boost!

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  • Eisenstein 9 days ago

    And how much delay is caused by waiting for that developer to show up and get hired?

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jrflowers 10 days ago

> I suspect most companies are cargo culting their hiring process.

This is what makes this story so funny. A lot of people are mad at the guy that found an exploit in the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system without a lick of ire directed at the “we only hire shaman genius rockstars” system.

Like if everybody’s profile on a dating app said “only interested in talking to Arnold Schwarzenegger”, then somebody’s eventually going to get catfished by a fake Kindergarten Cop. It’s kind of a “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” situation

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austin-cheney 9 days ago

No.

First of all we are developers only. Calling ourselves engineers is a sociopathic lie. Almost none of us are capable of doing anything that resembles engineering.

The problem with software is permissive tolerance of gross incompetence. I have been doing this for 20 years in the corporate world and can easily say 15% of the workforce knows what they are doing. The rest is reliant on other things to do it for them: open source applications, frameworks, toolkits, AI. The problem with industry wide incompetence is that solution delivery is slow, piecemeal, and extremely narrow in scope.

It really doesn’t take much to be a 10x developer. I have been a 10x developer multiple times. It typically means I learn to do the full 8 hours worth of work in less than 2 hours so that I can play games all day. The work delivered tends to be far more durable and execute substantially faster so nobody asks many questions. It’s not that I’m smart. It’s that my peers just do the same stupid shit over and over without asking questions because they are getting by with imposter syndrome.

Employers need to occasionally hire a 10x developer otherwise they are going to be hiring outside firms to fill that gap.

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  • markus_zhang 9 days ago

    I have to say this treating other engineers as God attitude is really weird.

    Other engineers make horrendous mistakes too. Other engineers just get by too.

    If you think a piece of paper means really a lot, then so be it.

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    • dranudin 8 days ago

      I honestly don't understand that, as well. I am a real engineer on paper and now do full-time software development. The funny thing is, "real" engineers mostly think that programming computers is like doing magic. Meanwhile, many software developers think that "real" engineers are somehow special..

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  • anon_e-moose 9 days ago

    > First of all we are developers only. Calling ourselves engineers is a sociopathic lie. Almost none of us are capable of doing anything that resembles engineering.

    What if you did engineering before and just moved to software engineering because that somehow pays more than the noble profession of engineering?

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    • austin-cheney 9 days ago

      Much like many attorneys that instead choose the less noble profession of police officer. Yes, that does happen, but it’s not the scenario that most software people consider when arbitrarily choosing such lofty false titles. Most software people were never licensed electrical/mechanical/civil engineers.

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