Software engineer Charity Majors challenges the "10x engineer" myth, arguing that true productivity lies in team performance, not individual brilliance. She encourages building workplaces where "normal" engineers can thrive. Are we focusing too much on hiring "the best" instead of the right people?
Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” Productivity I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me. However, I’d argue that individual productivity is... Read more »
“We only hire the best”
How many times have you heard a company claim that they only hire the best? The top of the top. The crème de la crème. Most of them, by sheer necessity of math, are delusional. There just aren’t th…
AI makes weak engineers less harmful
Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create problems that their colleagues have to spend time solving. That’s why many tech companies try to build a small, ludicrously well-paid team instead of a large team of more average engineers, and why so far this seems to be a winning strategy.
Don't hire top talent; hire for weaknesses. - Benji's Blog
Design your hiring process to find the right people to strengthen your teams' weaknesses, rather than trying to find the best people. Instead of "how can we find the smartest people?" think about "how can we find the people who will make our team stronger?"
Pure and impure software engineering
Why do solo game developers tend to get into fights with big tech engineers? Why do high-profile external hires to large companies often fizzle out? Why is AI-assisted development amazing for some engineers and completely useless for others?
Reasons to hire inexperienced engineers
There are many reasons to consider hiring inexperienced software engineers into your team, beyond the commonly discussed factors of cost and social responsibility. Hire to maximise team effectiveness; not to maximise team size. Adding more people increases the communication and synchronisation overhead in the team. Growing a team has rapidly diminishing returns. However, adding the... Read more »
Palantir’s billionaire CEO says only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers — ‘or you’re neurodivergent’ | Fortune
Billionaire Alex Karp tells Gen Z to skip elite college degrees, as one-fifth of Fortune 500 companies recruit more neurodivergent talent by 2027.
Hire More Women (and people with diverse experiences and identities) In Tech
Stop missing out on exceptional tech talent. Diverse senior leaders deliver better business outcomes and better products and services.
Engineers do get promoted for writing simple code
It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in other words, engineers who deliver overcomplicated crap will be promoted, because their work looks more impressive to non-technical managers.
Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford
How to Hire
Most companies approach hiring with faulty assumptions and poor practices. They believe talent is fixed rather than contextual. They fail to create real partnerships between internal recruiters and hiring managers. And they rely too much on salary surveys and rigid compensation formulas. The author shares what she learned about making and keeping great hires during her 14 years as the chief talent officer at Netflix. The process requires probing beneath the surface of people and their résumés; engaging managers in every aspect of hiring; ensuring that recruiters deeply understand the business and are not viewed as support staff; adopting a mindset in which you’re always recruiting; and coming up with compensation that suits the performance you need and the future you aspire to. These lessons may be especially relevant to fast-growing tech-based firms, whose rapid innovation means a continual need for new talent. But organizations of all types can benefit from taking a fresh look at their hiring and compensation practices.
The engineering manager's attention budget
Every Engineering Manager has 5 jobs - most distribute their 100 'attention points' across only 2-3 of them
Undervalued Software Engineering Skills: Writing Well
I have been coaching several experienced software engineers to further grow professionally, since transitioning [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/things-ive-learned-transitioning-from-engineer-to-engineering-manager/] to being an engineering manager. I have noticed a few skills that people often underestimate the importance of developing. Skills that add a
Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness
Employee well-being and happiness are surprisingly powerful predictors of performance.
daniel: "I don't think we need 10x developers to build great things. I think we need 10x teams – groups of people who care about the same problem, who iterate together, and who make each other better" 🤍
daniel r(ooooooh) 👻
wrote a few words on why I think @npmx.dev might be going places
