Re:High performance individuals and teams (2020)
by blagie on Friday May 27, 2022 @09:08PM
(#31536677)
My experience with those contexts is that there can't be 10x engineers, but not really for that reason. 10x engineers do well in contexts where there are _hard_ problems. There really aren't 10x engineers for _messy_ problems. Most mundane systems aren't _hard_ but _messy_, especially with regards to customer requirements. These include most:
- Inventory management systems
- Employee records systems
- Health care records systems
- Etc.
Most of this work is about:
- Managing legacy tools and systems, much of which is diving into some complex mess for a few days to change one line of code
- Managing odd-ball one-off use-cases. If the customer has coupon code X, and is in Minnesota, do Y. If an employee was laid off on the last day in February in a leap year, do Z. Etc. These glum on and make spaghetti, and a lot of coding is just about getting stuff like this done.
- Long, boring meetings
- Documentation and, if you're lucky, test infrastructure
- ... and so on.
Technical performance matters a lot less than a whole bunch of other skills, and in most cases, hiring criteria are often "has a pulse." Most such systems use an "enterprise" stack (e.g. Java+Oracle or Microsoft tools).
- Inventory management systems
- Employee records systems
- Health care records systems
- Etc.
Most of this work is about:
- Managing legacy tools and systems, much of which is diving into some complex mess for a few days to change one line of code
- Managing odd-ball one-off use-cases. If the customer has coupon code X, and is in Minnesota, do Y. If an employee was laid off on the last day in February in a leap year, do Z. Etc. These glum on and make spaghetti, and a lot of coding is just about getting stuff like this done.
- Long, boring meetings
- Documentation and, if you're lucky, test infrastructure
- ... and so on.
Technical performance matters a lot less than a whole bunch of other skills, and in most cases, hiring criteria are often "has a pulse." Most such systems use an "enterprise" stack (e.g. Java+Oracle or Microsoft tools).