News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer by BeetleB on Friday October 08, 2021 @12:50PM (#28801294)
Norvig wasn't given a random problem that he then solved quickly. He picked the problem to work on. I'm sure I can give him problems of similar complexity that I work on for my job and he wouldn't do it that quickly. Quicker than me, for sure - but it wouldn't be hard to find someone who does it quicker than he did.

I'm sure I can find problems that I can solve quickly and amaze people. Being able to pick your own problems makes for a bad metric for identifying 10x programmers.

Re:Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer by jimbokun on Friday October 08, 2021 @02:22PM (#28802388)
This is one example.

Norvig has written a ton of kick ass programs in his career that are concise, efficient, and correct, in much less time than most programmers would require.

Furthermore, even picking your own problems can be a way to achieve > 10x productivity, as identifying useful problems to solve is also a crucial skill.

I attended a talk given by Norvig, where he frankly admitted Google picked markets to enter where they could get good quality data to train their machine learning models on (this was many years ago). Maybe lesser developers wouldn't have that insight.

Re:Things I’ve learned in my 20 years as a software engineer by Too on Saturday October 09, 2021 @03:08AM (#28807704)
People can be 10x in one domain but not in others, experience is part of the equation. That's not too strange is it? Compare a football player in a ice hockey team. Even though they still have a significant head start compared to someone on the street, when it comes to physique, ball sense, etc.