On July 11th this tweet thread started, and ever since “10x engineer” has been an ongoing topic of humor & memes on Twitter. The gripes range from what appear to be nothing more than sour grapes, to very legitimate critiques of the itemized list of attributes that follow it. I’ll try to avoid the sour grapes and get right to the more valid critiques:
Having worked with a whole spectrum of capable people I can agree with the “bot” & add that the really good ones, are actually scared-to-death of “anything new” because the hype usually doesn’t live up to the reality. “anything new” gets the attention of non-technical decision makers and salespeople. “anything new” comes up in board rooms and power point presentations. The really good programmers know what works and if “anything new” comes along that is good, they’ll know a network of folks that can validate that it’s worth the effort before devoting any brain-power to it. The real trick to being awesome and productive is not getting caught up in fads and kludges.
Absolutively! I’ve known plenty of folks that saw a ticket and immediately declared: “I know what that is!” However, the idea that someone has memorized every line of code is ludicrous because the productive folks have written thousands of lines of codes over years if not decades! Opara drives the point home by pointing out how ridiculous it would be for them to leave these bugs laying around.
I am certain that caffeine has nothing to do with programming skills because I don’t touch the stuff. Nuff said.
No joke, a + b + c != d. That combination of sentences was what we refer to as cognitive dissonance.
Agreed Teao, everyone down to a 1x anyone deserves respect and civility. .5x? Not-so-much.
Now, to balance things out, I’d like to take issue with a few of the criticisms:
Sorry “lex” but you’d probably have more than 6 followers if you knew that pseudo-code is for training and whiteboards. I’ve honestly never met one of these “engineer of any decent..” people you speak of. I’ve worked on & with small to gigantic teams, and unless they were a complete n00b or dealing with some recursive mess trying to outsmart themselves they rarely-if-ever regressed to academic approaches to what is for most an artistic talent.
I’ve worn out a few keyboards in my time, but I replace them… so I guess I’m again disqualified, however the would-be-Sensei has a point here. It is grueling to work with someone who doesn’t know at least a few shortcut keys and that taking a few minutes to adjust their IDE settings is worth the effort.
By now I’m sure I’ve lost most of you to the comments on these different threads. That was one viral post, and Mr. Kirani has trolled with the best of them. My last piece of advice, if you’re still with me… If you do fancy yourself a “10x” anything, you probably need to keep it toned down a bit. At least try to help some folks learn some things… otherwise you kinda suck at life.