[HN Gopher] Being "rockstars": when software was a talents/creat... ___________________________________________________________________ Being "rockstars": when software was a talents/creatives industry Author : srpablo Score : 184 points Date : 2023-06-29 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (morepablo.com) (TXT) w3m dump (morepablo.com) | johnea wrote: | It still is, and like actual "rockstars", the workers are being | exploited by ownership that, for some reason, are the only ones | who are supposed to profit off of "rock". | | Don't know how many musicians you know, just ask one... | billllll wrote: | Apologies in advance for being a bit negative. I feel like this | sentence is just so revealing: | | > That said, he and I will likely never see eye-to-eye on this | because he more-or-less invented Choose Boring Technology, and | most of what I advocate is to break playbook, embrace narrative, | and be interesting. | | It really comes down to what you prioritize. Do you prioritize | the output and the value added? Or do you prioritize making your | engineers feel like "rockstars"? If you don't care about your end | product, then yeah sure let your engineers break prod using | untested technologies. | | The reason playbooks have sprung up, is because 99% of use-cases | for businesses are for the most part "solved." We're not in the | era of renting colos and manually setting up MySQL anymore (which | the author advocates for in order to return to "creatives," btw). | We have managed solutions that you can throw money at. So, do you | leverage those solutions to help you solve your problem? Or do | you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so they can feel | smart? | | The "rockstar" treatment is a result of supply and demand. Talent | in Hollywood/music can get the rockstar treatment, because the | talent alone is the difference between millions of dollars. If | you have a really talented coder who can be interchanged with | another really talented coder, you do not have a "rockstar." | | The "rockstar" era of coding was the result of a massive | imbalance in supply/demand for engineers, so the rockstar | treatment would help attract talent. Now that the supply has | began shifting up to meet the demand, it makes sense that the | "rockstar" treatment is starting to go away. | | And good riddance to all that too. I don't need to work with any | more software engineers who think it's okay to be a massive dick | to everyone just because they can implement a CRUD app. If you | want to be a rockstar, go actually be a rockstar, don't make | software engineering worse. | thr_ddv wrote: | The reason why we don't have rockstar engineers is because the | markets been filled with talentless hacks who can't code their | way out of a paper bag without a jira epic breaking it down for | them. | | I had the pleasure of pair programming with ye olde rockstar | for two weeks and we added more value in those two weeks to the | company than the rest of the team did in a year. | | I'm the cto I should know. | anthomtb wrote: | Two weeks? You're the CTO and had a rockstar programmer | sitting next to you. Why didn't it take one? | Solvency wrote: | Since when is the CTO expected to be to be a rockstar | programmer? CTOs communicate technology matters to the | board that they are beholden to. And they manage the | technology teams within a small region towards the top of | their departments pyramid. | | These are different skills and responsibilities from being | an elite rockstar developer. | davidcbc wrote: | Sounds like the company needs a new CTO if all your engineers | are talentless hacks | chinchilla2020 wrote: | this is satire, right? | rockstar-guy-23 wrote: | Appreciate the candor. But we're all just here to get our | fill, baby. B) | | I only rockstar when my incentive structure has an unbounded | ceiling. If you're paying me a salary, plus meager bonus, | plus some bennies, plus some lottery tickets -- you're gonna | get me at my 40-60%. Just enough to be above average. | | Throw in some profit-sharing, and now we're talking, baby. | What ever happened to that? Share some of the pie and I'll | jump as high as you need me to. | | Anything else is just foolish! | apsurd wrote: | Why is it foolish? I get the cynical attitude around not | feeling like you're being taken advantage of; feeling like | a fool. Is that the core reason? It's the sentiment | (nothing wrong with that) | | I ask because while I don't reject this position, isn't | there something to be said for intrinsic vs extrinsic | motivation: one's internal notion of excellence, pride, | discipline, respect, mastery, craft, grit... insert various | honoring-self words. | | Seems precarious to me, to let external dictate ones | concept of value. Btw, I suffer from "doing my best" so | that's why I'm curious, I am not shilling for BigCo. | rockstar-guy-23 wrote: | You bring up good points. And like all good points, they | stand off to the side and proclaim nothing -- or atleast | not enough that it's easy to refute them. So the only | guiding light left is our values -- and what we | personally believe. | | I do not have notions of excellence, pride, discipline, | respect, mastery, craft, grit, or anything of higher | substance inside of me. At one point in my life, I'm sure | I did, but they have been beaten out of me. Some have | been taken advantage of by the ulterior motives of | others; and some have simply not been conducive to | achieving my goals (i.e. having fun, putting bread on the | table, not ending up in the streets, living a leisurely | and relaxed life, etc.). | | In another vein, one could make the argument that the | precarious thing is to tie one's intrinsic motivations -- | those little devils inside of us -- onto a "job." That | job will one day end, and you will have to find another | as an effective outlet for those little devils; otherwise | depression and all sorts of psychological illness will | start encroaching. If one wishes to keep one's values | strong, why make them dependent on uncontrollable things? | Unless you are independently wealthy (if that is the | case, I can offer nothing), there will be times you will | be required to make sacrifice of your values to "get the | job done." You will have to be sloppy, amateur, lazy, | selfish, and maybe even villainous to do what needs to be | done. At that point, you can hold strong and suffer the | consequences, or you can relent, tell yourself you are | temporarily setting aside higher ideals (it never is | temporary), get the job done... and suffer the | consequences. | | Tying your soul, your essence to such a thing is | precarious. Putting your heart into things that will | require you to abdicate your integrity is foolish. You | will end up hurt, broken, and missing pieces of yourself. | It is better, and more sustainable, to save that sort of | thing to matters that aren't directly related to your | survival. Otherwise, to charge steadfastly into what one | knows will be suffering is noble, but foolish. | manicennui wrote: | I think I'm falling for you. | apsurd wrote: | This is a really helpful reply. Thank you. Some thoughts: | | Excellence is not in contrast to fun, leisure, and | relaxation; it's made that way via Capitalism and hustle | culture. | | > In another vein, one could make the argument that the | precarious thing is to tie one's intrinsic motivations -- | those little devils inside of us -- onto a "job." | | Well said. I suppose it does take more energy, effort and | soul really, to constantly decouple one's job from | identity and worth. That one's internal values _ought_ to | permeate through one's life "authentically" is certainly | easier said than done. | | Thanks again for responding in earnest. I'm convinced | lol. | muh_gradle wrote: | Why hire these people then | lukebitts wrote: | It's always so funny seeing these kinds of comments from | throwaway accounts | eterm wrote: | Not so funny: someone wrote a tool which attributes | throwaways with alarming accuracy. | swores wrote: | I found the tool submission you're talking about, I | remember putting my username into it when it was first | shown and it did produce a list of accounts with % | probabilities (in my case all unrelated to me), but when | I tried doing it again now it says "This user does not | have any public activity in the previous three years." | for "swores" (and I've multiple comments just this week). | | Luckily for the throwaway person above, it says the same | for them. But does still show results for some, maybe | only big accounts now? | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568709 | | edit: ahh, I think it just took a one-time snapshot of | the three years leading up to its 2021 creation, as my | old username that I changed to swores does show up. So | it's an interesting proof of concept that someone could | do similar analysis, but not an ongoing tool. So it won't | be telling us which CTO to avoid :P | eterm wrote: | That's not the tool I remember, the tool I remember was | similar but it correctly found all my alts, whereas that | one does not. | | Edit: I think it was this one that has been shut down: | https://stylometry.net/ | swores wrote: | Ah, I wonder if any other people have made similar for | private use... | thr_ddv wrote: | Because I'd sink the company I'm golden hand cuffed to if I | said what I think about the engineers I have to manage. But | I do think I'll be bringing in SAP timesheets to share my | pain with everyone: | | > We need to keep track of the time your spending on your | opex KIPs. We can't pay your expected bonus if you don't. | majormajor wrote: | So as cto did you just totally screw up at hiring, or | were you brought in later but somehow don't have | authority or ability to fix anything?? | | IME when I've seen a "1/10th engineer" it's almost always | been a total management failure. | thr_ddv wrote: | The budget I have for hiring is tiny and no one on the | board believes 10x engineers exist. The choise is between | not shipping anything at all or having to deal with said | talentless hacks who happen to know more than me about | tool X but otherwise slow development to a crawl. | | Turns out reading HN comments is not a good way to run a | company. Who would have thought? | majormajor wrote: | I mean I also sure hope nobody is reading your comments | to learn about running a company! They'd learn about "not | answering the question," though, I guess. | | Remind me, whose job is it to convince other execs and | the board of the most appropriate talent strategy? Maybe | lesson 1 here is "if you're running a company and don't | trust your CTO, look for a new one"? | [deleted] | muh_gradle wrote: | > Turns out reading HN comments is not a good way to run | a company. Who would have thought? | | Literally everyone thought this, and probably even the | talentless hacks that you hired. Strange that you had to | create a throwaway account to figure this one out. | jstarfish wrote: | It sounds like you hired a personal mercenary, not a 10x | engineer. _Everybody_ is more productive when they ignore | the rules everyone else is expected to follow. | | There's probably nothing wrong with your existing team | except it being too large and democratic. One guy can | bounce ideas around in his head faster than a dozen | negotiating them with each other. I've seen teams like | yours, and IME the issue isn't always incompetence, | sometimes each of them thinks _they 're_ the rockstar. | Anytime one of them doesn't get their way, they jam | everything up for everyone else. | | We've become too democratic as a whole. Nobody follows | orders from above; everybody expects to have a say in | things they don't even have a stake in. Whenever you get | to hiring again, try stacking your team with 2-4 ex- | military types and see how it works out for you (it works | well for UPS well beyond that scale). You don't get | bleeding-edge experience (and never a 10x-er), but you | get tax breaks, competence, obedience, people trained to | work as a cohesive unit, and you can wave the flag and | call yourself a patriot (which helps with government | contracts if that's your business). | cjg wrote: | This: "Everybody is more productive when they ignore the | rules everyone else is expected to follow" | apsurd wrote: | you're the CTO of a company mostly composed of talentless | hack engineers that can't code their way out of a paper | bag? You're literally the apex engineering lead; that's | so... sad. Do something about it. | metalforever wrote: | The comment mirrors my experience in the industry over a | long period. | HeyLaughingBoy wrote: | They're not wrong, though. | mjr00 wrote: | "Talentless hacks" is a bit too far, but it's very true that | over the past decade, software development has been flooded | with people who don't care about software development: people | who never touched a desktop computer until university, where | they only went into CS because they knew a $150k starting | salary at a cushy job was waiting on the other side. | | Nothing wrong with them doing this, of course. And they're | very smart people. But you really can tell the difference | between "software developer who takes pride in their work and | wants to build something great" versus "software developer | who wants to pay their bills". It's the difference between | the developer who responds to a packaging problem by learning | their build and dependency management system inside out to | understand what's going on, versus the developer who copies | and pastes from SO/ChatGPT until it works for some reason and | moves on with their life. | | Granted, not all software development companies _deserve_ the | former. But a tightly focused startup with 50 developers from | the former category can absolutely dominate the market, at | least until they get acquired, as we 've seen so many times | before: e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, OpenAI. | bob1029 wrote: | I believe the new "rockstar" developer is one who can | completely subvert their own ego in order to better serve the | business/customer/team. | | The age of toiling away with weird tech in a dark corner and | then expecting the team to be amazed at your contraptions is | 2000% over. I've definitely been through this lesson a few | times myself. It works and works until it doesn't and then one | day you find that you are left holding a really big bag. My new | ego trip is watching junior team members quickly ramp and | become productive. Maybe you don't have to turn that ego off at | all. Perhaps you just need to find a way to redirect it and get | it hooked onto a new, more productive target. | | If you want to go try crazy new stuff - do it on your own time. | I really don't understand why this is controversial. It's the | best of both worlds. I've heard some excuses for why this is | infeasible but they're super-duper bullshit to my ears. If it | works on your home lab and it is obviously a cool/valuable | thing, _then_ maybe put together a 5 minute pitch deck and | present it to your manager /cto/etc. | poslathian wrote: | Beautiful. Agree. The juniors come in with a lot of technical | education that would have been near impossible to learn on | the job. | | Effective teamwork in this setting is just as foundational as | skills they acquired in school but they only begin learning | it after they graduate. | | Very rewarding to contribute to the growth in jr devs | teamwork when it happens. | Solvency wrote: | Maybe for CRUD business apps this is true, but there are | constant innovations and research papers coming from | rockstars in dark corners of the world. All of the time. | turtledragonfly wrote: | I feel like the author themselves is a bit scattered on this | point. | | In the very quote you lead with, they link to another post[1], | which says "...MySQL is boring. Postgres is boring." Our author | says they don't like that Boring approach, but then they | advocate for a "pets, not cattle" approach, which I think _is_ | in line with administering a MySQL server, or such. | | Maybe this all comes down to different people's definitions of | Boring. Maybe modern developers think of "Cloud everything" as | the boring/playbook approach, while other people (like me) see | the older (in my mind simpler) idea of administering a few | machines, maybe even on bare metal, to be Boring. | | You wrote: | | > So, do you leverage those solutions to help you solve your | problem? Or do you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so | they can feel smart? | | In my charitable interpretation of TFA, I think they are saying | to let your engineers use smaller-scale solutions/technologies | that address the problem at hand, as needed, rather than | getting pulled into the Cloud-everything solve-all-your-future- | problems-you-don't-even-have-yet ball of wax that's often | advocated these days. | | I can get behind that sentiment, but yeah I'm not a big fan of | the way it's framed in the article, and I have never liked the | "rockstar" term. | | [1] https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology | feoren wrote: | I think you're suffering from a lack of imagination. | | > 99% of use-cases for businesses are for the most part | "solved." | | History is over, technology is done advancing, every business | idea has already been had and executed well, everything that | can be done has already been done. Sure. And you would have | said the exact same thing last year, and 10 years ago, and 50 | years ago, and 400 years ago, and you would have been | monumentally wrong each time. But June 29, 2023 is different. | This is the first day of the end of history. | | By the way, the quotes around your word "solved" stand for many | things, including paying through the nose for ineffective B.S. | jobs that only exist due to inertia. | | > do you let your engineers re-invent the wheel so they can | feel smart? | | The Curiosity Rover's wheels, which were re-invented for that | purpose, are getting holes in them because the kind of rocks | they expected to find are slightly different. Perseverance had | its wheels re-invented again to fix this. Someone should have | told those so-called _rocket scientists_ at NASA that they 're | only trying to make themselves feel smart! If we never re- | invented the wheel, we'd all be driving around on carved stone. | "But you're not NASA, loser!" you say. Why not? Why aren't you | doing something new too? | | > the talent alone is the difference between millions of | dollars | | This is still true. One single talented coder can be the | difference between a multi-million dollar business succeeding | or failing. I have no idea why you think this is not true | anymore; my guess is that you're completely unable to recognize | these people when you're around them. Don't worry, most people | can't recognize them. | | In before: "wow, you really think you're an underappreciated | rockstar, huh?" -- potentially. Of course I can't prove it over | the internet. But rockstars are as much of the product of the | environment you put them in as they are their own brains. Maybe | rockstars actually are more common than you realize -- maybe | _you 're_ the reason they're not rocking out. | | > If you have a really talented coder who can be interchanged | with another really talented coder, you do not have a | "rockstar." | | Or maybe the shackles and chains you're putting around these | talented coders are forcing them into the same sub-optimal | modes where they can't shine. I suspect if you really fostered | an environment where software engineers could grow, learn, and | shine -- where you fucking TRUST them, in other words -- you'd | find they're not so replaceable as you think. | | > I don't need to work with any more software engineers who | think it's okay to be a massive dick to everyone | | It's never okay to be a massive dick to everyone. In my | experience, dickishness is negatively correlated with skill and | talent, not positively. This is not an argument against highly | talented programmers. | srpablo wrote: | Hi! Author here :) | | > It really comes down to what you prioritize. Do you | prioritize the output and the value added? Or do you prioritize | making your engineers feel like "rockstars"? If you don't care | about your end product, then yeah sure let your engineers break | prod using untested technologies. | | First, the post is about sentiment. It's a response to a piece | called "Software and its Discontents," about how people feel. | So it's going to focus on that. | | But I also think the narrative of people working on a project | _does_ impact its success. I don 't think you pick EITHER "make | developers feel like they're doing great, innovative work" OR | "do you care about the end product for customers"; the key is | to find a way to achieve both, because they feed off each other | and are related. | | It's as if I asked "do you want company growth, or customer | happiness?" Try both! | | > The reason playbooks have sprung up, is because 99% of use- | cases for businesses are for the most part "solved." We're not | in the era of renting colos and manually setting up MySQL | anymore (which the author advocates for in order to return to | "creatives," btw). We have managed solutions that you can throw | money at. | | I disagree they're solved! Again, this is in response to a | 3-part series basically saying "everything is expensive and | everyone is miserable and fewer businesses are succeeding." | From a profitability perspective, when was the last Google or | Facebook made? | | > And good riddance to all that too. I don't need to work with | any more software engineers who think it's okay to be a massive | dick to everyone just because they can implement a CRUD app. | | To be 1000% clear: I also hate(d) the machismo/showboating we | got from the rockstar/ninjas era. I'm a former theatre artist | and I'm mostly about embracing people and creativity. | chinchilla2020 wrote: | I think the analogy is a good one but needs to be tweaked a | bit. | | "Rockstars" make tens/hundreds of millions or even billions. | A good software engineer can make as much as a doctor (in the | US) or accountant. You don't have to be a rockstar to be a | 400k/year accountant. | | The pay in tech has never been high enough to justify the | sort of extreme talent competition in sports and hollywood. | Even some of the greatest software engineers (e.g. Guido Van | Rossum) are paid pretty modestly in the low seven figure | range. | | Real world Rockstars like Taylor Swift live a glamorous | lifestyle, travel the world, and tend to work short, 2-3 hour | gigs. Nobody with a rockstar personality is going to sit in a | flourescently-lit office building staring at screen for 8 | hours a day. No matter how many ping pong tables and free | kombucha kegs there are, it is a very dull environment and | does not attract the sort of ambition that rockstars have. | sublinear wrote: | > Nobody with a rockstar personality is going to sit in a | flourescently-lit office building staring at screen for 8 | hours a day. ... it is a very dull environment and does not | attract the sort of ambition that rockstars have. | | Maybe I'm just old, but when I think of a rockstar I think | of a lead singer or guitarist that has spent most of their | life practicing their craft and loves it so much that when | we see them perform it's just a taste of what's inside of | their head and heart. | [deleted] | MichaelZuo wrote: | There's at least several tens of thousands in 'tech' | worldwide taking home mid 7 figures to 8 figure salaries | USD or USD equivalent, and not including those in the | C-suite either. | | They are just rarely mentioned on HN because there's | already enough tech billionaires to exhaust the patience | and attention span of most readers seeking out that kind of | content. | rvbissell wrote: | This article was my first introduction to your blog. I'd like | to tell you that I love your writing style. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | It's interesting. I work for what is now a Big Tech company, | but I started before the IPO. | | We built a lot of in-house infra. We had few runbooks. We ran | tons of high-scale services with a pretty low corresponding | headcount. And we had a great culture, that was definitely | more personality based than the rest of Big Tech. Individuals | had Opinions (TM). On-call was about having a durable | understanding of the system and sleuthing around to figure | out what was happening (along with a strong emphasis on | _learning_ from failures and putting systems /practices into | place to fix those.) And we, as engineers, were weird. My | tech lead rolled into work at 11 AM every morning on their | skateboard. I used to take a 2 hour daily break from 2-4 PM, | go home at 6, and work again between 8-10 PM (ish, this was | flexible) before I went to bed and was known to enjoy coffee | with fried chicken. Our infrastructure and our services | reflected our personality quirks and the interpersonal | relationships we had in the office. On-call was one of my | favorite things at the company because all the different | personalities would weigh in with their different quirks and | would offer different perspectives on big problems, and | together we'd solve tough issues. | | Somewhere along the ZIRP-age this all changed. We needed to | become a Real Company (TM) now. We needed to have runbooks. | We needed to have Boring Technology. We were poised for huge | growth after all (aka our stock value shot through the roof.) | The new managers we brought in needed to build out new teams | to grow fast, fast, fast. How can we grow when we had such | immature processes? We started building runbooks and hiring | teams to manage them. Incidents started requiring 3-pages | minimum of paperwork to document, which was enforced by an | incident management team. Teams dreaded these incidents and | where once we collaborated to fix problems, now teams became | defensive and combative during incidents. Now we needed the | incident management team to force engineers to cooperate | during incidents because each team was trying to be as | defensive as possible. Managers stopped thinking in terms of | individuals with strengths and weaknesses and started | thinking about headcount, both cost and allocation. Headcount | became everything. With this change, attrition also spiked. | | What used to take 1-2 engineers to spin up over a week or two | now took months. We load tested our new services, but now we | needed to make load tests repeatable and runnable in a | runbook. Teams became extra defensive about features because | the cost of every incident became so high. Nobody wanted to | be the team that missed an integration test which came up as | a cause of an incident. Our net reliability didn't actually | change though the thinking was that repeatability would allow | more seamless swapping of headcount. Program managers managed | migrations and we started creating status meeting meetings | which rolled up statuses of multiple ongoing initiatives | cascading over multiple teams. | | My own experience at the company went from having fun writing | code and interacting with quirky folks at work to dealing | with engineers who were dotting their is and crossing their | ts in every aspect of their job. The managers treated us as | headcount and so headcount we became. It's been a highly | depressing arc to a job I loved and where I built a lot of | high-scale code at, but perhaps the most frustrating has been | watching our velocity decrease despite our headcount | ballooning due to the overhead of programs, migrations, and | incident management that developed their own bureaucracies. | The saddest part is that the oldest parts of the company have | become so essential and the bureaucracy so thick around them | that replacing them has become really challenging. The parts | of the company that were developed with the least care are | the hardest to replace. | billllll wrote: | > It's as if I asked "do you want company growth, or customer | happiness?" Try both! | | Obviously, both are "good," but again, what's the end goal? | To truly be the problem solver, you must make the hard | decisions and tradeoffs. Companies trade-off growth versus | customer happiness all the time. Right now, a lot of the | largest companies are the ones that prioritize growth. | | To loop back to the point, obviously employee morale and a | good end product is "good" and can have synergy, but again, | what's the end goal? At some point, you must prioritize. A | lot of companies have been very successful prioritizing the | end product versus making their engineers feel good, which is | why I think this topic recurs. | | > I disagree they're solved! Again, this is in response to a | 3-part series basically saying "everything is expensive and | everyone is miserable and fewer businesses are succeeding." | | I some ways, I think the 3-part series and your article are | basically saying the opposite. The 3-part series acknowledges | the market conditions and overabundance in the past, and says | that in order to get the same results, we need to be smarter | moving forward. Whereas your post is (in general) saying that | it use to be really good in the past when we were treated | like rockstars, we should return to that. | | And returning to the point, technical problems being "solved" | is not mutually exclusive with a general market downturn. | That is to say, you can't point at the general market | downturn to say that deploying a CRUD app is not a solved | problem. | | And this gets to my main point (which I think the author of | the 3-part series would agree with): returning to the | "rockstar" era will absolutely not bring software companies | back to the crazy valuations and money. The "rockstar" era | was the result and not the cause of the crazy valuations of | the past. | srpablo wrote: | > I some ways, I think the 3-part series and your article | are basically saying the opposite. The 3-part series | acknowledges the market conditions and overabundance in the | past, and says that in order to get the same results, we | need to be smarter moving forward. Whereas your post is (in | general) saying that it use to be really good in the past | when we were treated like rockstars, we should return to | that. | | I like this framing, thanks for it. Typically, when | something is suboptimal, there's one argument that says "go | back to before we [X]-ed" and another that says "no, we | need to [X] smarter." | | Illustrating this, [on another post of mine, I discuss how | Alex Russell effectively says "SPAs/React are terrible" and | Laurie Voss has a rebuttal of "no, we need better | frameworks, smarter frameworks!"][1] Another example is | when FB was in trouble of Cambridge Analytica stuff, it | seemed like the answer to Bad Facebook was always More | Facebook. | | I'll look over it again, but I didn't get a giant message | from Kellan's posts of "we need to be smarter moving | forward," more about "how we got here." And I certainly | don't remember _how_ we 're supposed to be "smarter moving | forward." | | But I also don't think Kellan and I disagree too hard on | anything actually concrete. From [the footnote][2]: I think | we both want technical decision-making to be grounded in | business reality. I think a lot of scared leaders took the | "Boring Technology" slogan to mean "something that doesn't | scare me," which is IMO in practice was variations of "we | won't innovate" / "we'll operate like money will always be | free" / "we will use the most popular things I see in the | blogosphere." | | --- | | Said it in another comment, repeating here: I'm regretting | that "rockstars" is in the title . It was meant to support | the idea that tech was more of a "creatives" industry | (because the organic use of "rockstars" to mean "great | talent" is indicative of this); but I think my "break | playbook and embrace creativity" is being read as "let's go | back to rockstars/ninjas! Genius hackers who don't sleep | and just HACKHACKHACK!!!!" which is not how I feel. What | I'd like to go back to is taking some technical risk when | there's a good justification for it, even if it's not what | Uber did for their problems. | | --- | | > That is to say, you can't point at the general market | downturn to say that deploying a CRUD app is not a solved | problem. | | Well, many developers who were around in the Heroku era | think it's harder to deploy a simple CRUD app than it felt | like it was then :-p | | But I'm also not talking about CRUD apps, I was talking | about building a cost-efficient technology org for a better | business. That's why the examples I used (deployment | pipelines that costs tons of money and entire teams of | developers to build and run) tended to be expensive. Many | in the industry called these things "solved," but mostly | ran giant bills. Your initial comment said "you could throw | money at it," and I never thought that was the way, but | especially now that money isn't free. | | --- | | > And this gets to my main point (which I think the author | of the 3-part series would agree with): returning to the | "rockstar" era will absolutely not bring software companies | back to the crazy valuations and money. The "rockstar" era | was the result and not the cause of the crazy valuations of | the past. | | Again (and it's on me that this isn't more clear): I'm not | saying "RETVRN TO ROCKSTAR," it's more "I think we should | move the slider a little back to the "creatives" era." But | while I don't know if it will create crazy valuations, I | think it _can_ lead to happier developers, doing better | work, and probably more profitable businesses, even if | their market caps are lower. [1]: | https://morepablo.com/2023/02/little-piece-on-the-great- | divide-of-javascript.html [2]: | https://morepablo.com/2023/06/creatives- | industries.html#footnote1 | opportune wrote: | If you want to be as profitable as Google or Facebook, you | probably do need some rockstars, but you also need to be | developing a technology or business that _produces tremendous | amounts of value_. You can't just hire rockstars to work on | something low margin or without significant demand and expect | because they're amazing engineers that you'll make a lot of | money. Conversely Airbnb has made a lot of money and is just | CRUD - they pay a lot and I'm sure there's some fancy stuff | behind the scenes, but you could probably copy most of the | user visible functionality with a team of bootcamp devs. | | I feel like the tail is wagging the dog a bit here because if | what you're actually trying to optimize for is building | >$100b business, hiring rockstars or creating a rockstar | culture is just one aspect of getting there which you may not | even need. | srpablo wrote: | > If you want to be as profitable as Google or Facebook, | you probably do need some rockstars, but you also need to | be developing a technology or business that produces | tremendous amounts of value. | | Definitely agree on this. | | > You can't just hire rockstars to work on something low | margin or without significant demand and expect because | they're amazing engineers that you'll make a lot of money. | | This isn't what I'm trying to argue though -- I think when | you reach for the ceiling instead of avoid a floor, you're | more likely to find those tremendous business value | opportunities. Consider what Google shipped/built under | Schmidt, "20% time," "Don't be evil," and "we're a | different kind of company" vs... the last 10 years? | | I'm not saying "being wild and creative makes a bad | business good," I'm saying "embracing _some_ narratives of | a creative industry may increase output and be more cost- | effective, even if playing "outside the playbook of the 0% | era" is scary." | | --- | | On another note, I'm regretting that "rockstars" is in the | title . It was meant to support the idea that tech was more | of a "creatives" industry (and the organic use of that to | mean "great talent" is a symptom of that); but I think my | "break playbook and embrace creativity" is being read as | "let's go back to rockstars/ninjas! Genius hackers who | don't sleep and don't care about HR!!!!" which is... not | how I feel haha. | patja wrote: | The term "creative" has always bothered me as it seems to | usually be applied to roles that don't actually create | anything other than pretty pictures/designs/words. I | guess it makes sense from the aspect of "creativity" but | it seems like those who glom onto the appellation of | "creative" almost always rely on someone else to do the | heavy lifting of building (the actual creation of a | product) and bringing anything to market. | namaria wrote: | I think you're conflating 'creation' as in coming up with | something new, with 'production' as in making | stuff/providing services... | opportune wrote: | That's fair, I think I strawmanned you a bit - I know | you're not arguing that taking a creative approach to | software will automatically add value. | | To your point about Google, that approach did lead to | gmail, but also many abandoned projects like Buzz and | Reader that led to Google's infamous reputation for | canceling products. | | My original point remains: I think the business | requirements and goals should inform the culture and | hiring processes of a company. If you don't need to | deviate from the playbook to get things done, why should | you? And not every developer wants to deviate from the | playbook either, some prefer stable predictable work - | while I'm not personally in that camp I think it's not a | moral failing, doing unpredictable things is more | stressful as more things can go wrong, you might have to | work more or suffer the consequences of delays/starting | over, etc. | | If you're a bank, or a web consultancy, you _want_ boring | and predictable solutions. Conversely if you're OpenAi | you want people willing to reason from first principles | and invent crazy new things because you're shipping | cutting edge technology at massive scale - and I think | they're doing that. So I guess I'm left wondering where | exactly you think opportunities are being left on the | table due to overly rote software development practices | that would be improved by creativity? | majormajor wrote: | I've seen teams today have just as large an FTE team dedicated | to infrastructure as my employee 10 years ago to manage a set | of cloud services that cost wayyyy more than the colo hardware | we had doing basically the same amount of traffic. So people | cost hasn't always gone down as infra cost has gone up. "Shitty | internal heroku" has some advantages once you have engineers | that have been at the company more than 3 months: there's just | not nearly as much surface area to understand + you have the | source code right there if you really have to get int here. | Let's leave judgements out of this - you can just as easily | build a fragile tower of cloud services and abstractions to | "feel smart" as you can reinventing serving an application | (reinventing is a strong word anyway... it's just a _different_ | set of off the shelf tools usually). And in many cases | "managed" services manage the easy part (standing up the | hardware and installing the service) and don't manage the hard | part (configuring the hundreds of knobs to optimize your | particular use case) particularly well. | | I'm not close enough to the metal for those services/infra | teams, though, to be able to completely tell if the FTE hours | spent on all that cloud stuff are _necessary_. That is - can | you throw stuff into the cloud and set-it-and-forget-it and not | deal with ongoing cloud /infra/config maintenance? But one of | the main things those teams seemed to often focus on was spend | - if you leave it unattended is the cost just going to eat you | up? But then there's a big irony. | YetAnotherNick wrote: | Just curious, what is the ratio of employee cost vs server | cost for the team under you? | majormajor wrote: | Wasn't running them all, but a couple recent companies had | ratios of about 1:4 and 1:2 (employee cost : cloud cost) | with cloud spend in the low-to-high hundred Ks annually. | | Curiously, the company with the higher cloud bill also had | the lower ratio (spending more on both, but proportionally | more on engineering); my diagnosis after the fact is that | they were building for a "do 10x the scale" future that was | never realized but which would've pushed the cloud spend | higher without needing more dev spend. In the future, I | wouldn't spend so much that far in advance of actually | needing to scale. | milesvp wrote: | My experience with cloud migrations was that you could | migrate and forget about it. This was for a high traffic | metro newspaper, that was easy to cache for external users | but needed to handle a large newsroom using wordpress to | manage the content (wordpress can be a huge resource hog). | | The main costs in terms of labor end up being making sure | that backends services are updated. Same pain you'd feel in a | colo, except you cloud provider may force an upgrade you'd | otherwise wish to put off. Now I intentionally kept most | things at the VM level of abstraction, because it was clear | that the added complexity of something like Kuberetes wasn't | worth any savings you might get by needing one less server, | and I had enough granularity of healthchecks to just | automatically spin down any server that was causing problem | and let autoscaling work it's magic. This was also 10 years | ago, some choices might make less sense today, YMMV. | | Also, don't think I'm saying all those people aren't | necessary based on the current needs of the business. I just | knew I was in a very constrained environment and prioritized | anything that allowed for the constant shrinking headcount my | department was facing. | z3t4 wrote: | I think the problem with today's software is that there are few | amateurs. Most software developers are professionals who get paid | by the hour - that rather build something in 5 years then in 5 | days because they get paid to do it, they do not hate complexity | they embrace it. Something is taking 5 seconds you better make a | framework to solve it. Software is everywhere so CEO's will keep | paying. The good news is that a teenager can beat a team of 100 | engineers. The large team still have an upper hand with their | insane marketing budgets though. But who wants to be a developer | when you can get famous on Tiktok instead. | cosmiccatnap wrote: | The thing I find most sad about articles like this is that it | doesn't seem to actually address any of the reasons that it got | this way, it blames individuals within the field not a series of | MBA graduates telling you what the spec is and hiring 50 people | to hit an arbitrary deadline for a software project moving in the | wrong direction FAST. | | It's a false dichotomy to say you only have rock stars and as | this person smugly tip toes around "normal people" when in | reality you don't need rock stars anymore to make good software | and let's be honest... Most rock stars didn't make good software | they just make it in a time when software was generally even more | crap than it is now. | | You want to stop suffering among us plebs? Don't advocate for | goofy rockstar developer propaganda, advocate for healthy work | life balance and reasonable deadlines for things that truly don't | matter. Stop letting sales and marketing write your software and | stop taking opinions about systems design from your project | managers and "technical leads" when they do not work in these | systems day to day. | | If you treat engineers well and respect them before a client who | will drop you the moment a new product fits their need then yes | you will lose clients from time to time but if you focus on | making good software and happy people then you will attract | stable clients who do the same and maybe the stock holders at the | top don't get the ridiculous return per year that they expect out | of more shameless companies but at least you have a half decent | chance of sleeping at night... | | I am well aware that we live in a world where this will be | borderline impossible but the first step to solving a problem is | admitting it | sdsd wrote: | Tbh I think it depends where you work. In 1999, if you worked at | a Java shop making accounting software or whatever, it wasn't a | talents/creative industry. | | Same thing now days, but replace Java/accounting with React/CRUD. | The rockstar code ninja 10x mentality of 2009 is maybe gone for | good, but I see more crazy coders doing rockstar level stuff now | than ever before. Asahi Linus and alyssa rosenzweig being great | examples from the Asahi project, but these people are all over. | | People talk about the complexity of the infrastructure making it | impossible to do everything yourself, but in my experience is | exactly the opposite. The degree of abstration, automation, and | high-level tools means that you kinda can do everything without | knowing too much. | v64 wrote: | >Same thing now days, but replace Java/accounting with | React/CRUD. The rockstar code ninja 10x mentality of 2009 is | maybe gone for good, but I see more crazy coders doing rockstar | level stuff now than ever before. Asahi Linus and alyssa | rosenzweig being great examples from the Asahi project, but | these people are all over. | | To piggyback on this, I see many coders of this level of talent | in many different fields all working on their own projects that | are sponsored by Patreon or similar, rather than taking | traditional employment with companies in general. | KerrAvon wrote: | Asahi seems like a counterexample to your last point: you need | incredibly deep knowledge of several technologies to do what | they're doing. | intelVISA wrote: | For as ambiguous and misused as "10x" is I much prefer it over | infantile terms like "ninja rockstar etc." | totallywrong wrote: | Please somebody let _every recruiter on LinkedIn_ know. | highwaylights wrote: | I feel the exact opposite. | | I much prefer ninja, rockstar, magician, sorcerer, codebro, | gnarly dude, big daddy for loop, Little Bobby Tables, | SSHelley and Nadine. | | Nadine doesn't have a buzzword she's just really good with | Kubernetes. | | Anything but 10x-er. | gloryjulio wrote: | Not sure If I agree with this article. My experience in the big | co is that trying to navigate through large systems with many | moving parts and stakeholders and come up with a solution and | execute as quickly as you can is very exciting. And you | definitely need to be creative to trying to align and solve some | many problems in 1 design. It's a very challenging and fun | experience | metalforever wrote: | Not to bring in this separate issue, but it can be impossible | to navigate this as a technically skilled minority . Some | people just don't want to work with you and are not going to | work with you unless they can tell you exactly how things | should be. In large orgs, you may end up with more than one of | these people and they just don't align. If coming up with a | design that pleases both of them is possible at all, it ends up | being a turd architecturally . Later, because its a turd, | people pin blame on you. | gloryjulio wrote: | When you are blocked by non technical issues, it should be | the manager's job to help you clear the roadblocks. If the | manager is not doing his job, it's probably time to switch | teams or jobs. Tbf haven't seen anything like this yet. There | are tons minorities working in tech(myself included) | cudgy wrote: | "If the manager is not doing his job, it's probably time to | switch teams or jobs." | | You'll be switching jobs quite a bit then. | dagss wrote: | In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built by | a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in a | big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years. | | Almost the same specs, but the one in the startup had better | scalability and fewer serious bugs... | | So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality? | | Worst is I now consider case b) quite lean and efficient compared | to what I see tech consultancies doing towards public sector, | banks, etc... | | -- My point being: There definitely IS a room for "rockstars" | (don't like that term, but interpret this as developers competent | enough to carry a lot of weight on their own and work in a | smaller company) to deliver a lot of value. | | The problem with the model is the lack of predictability (what if | the few developers you trust don't deliver), the bus factor if | one of the few devs quits, etc | | In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you loose | redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the output of | 10, but much lower risk. | Karrot_Kream wrote: | > In a sense inefficiency is a goal, because otherwise you | loose redundancy. It costs a lot to hire 100 to produce the | output of 10, but much lower risk. | | The problem is the velocity hit you take by doing this is its | own risk that's not tracked in the same way predictability and | bus factor are. I'll bet one of the core reasons OpenAI was | able to release a ChatGPT style product so much faster than | Google, despite Google coming up with the fundamental | Transformer breakthroughs, is this difference in velocity. And | when a startup begins to erode a calcified, highly redundant | larger company, then the larger company has the risk of | becoming irrelevant along with all of its internal redundancy. | dilyevsky wrote: | > The problem is the velocity hit you take by doing this is | its own risk that's not tracked in the same way | predictability and bus factor are. | | Yep, this is known as McNamara Fallacy - | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy | Clubber wrote: | >b) 100+ developers in a big company with a much much larger | budget in 2 years. | | Mythical man month in play. In my experience, teams working on | a single project peak at around 3-4 people, depending on how | well you can silo the responsibilities. You can have 200 | developers on a massive project, but the planners need to be | able to silo the pieces off properly and define interfaces very | well early on, which requires a massive planning phase. That | usually doesn't happen the way people want it to either. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month | | Currently on my team, we have one guy responsible for the | schema, back end webapis and automation. Another guy does | exclusively UI, those are the two main people. We have another | guy responsible for auth and misc stuff and the third guy is a | full stack that came in after major development was complete | who can add features pretty quickly. We have a completely | separate team that handles billing operations/applications of 2 | people. Our team members communicate directly with business for | requirements and understanding their needs, so nothing gets | convoluted passing information down through middle channels. | | It's not the only way to do it, but it works pretty well for | us. We write all the programming required for operations of a | pretty complex medical company. This was a complete Greenfield | project and we have about 10 major and minor applications so | far. We also have to adapt to incoming partner companies who | have their own special needs and changing regulations, so the | system and team is very flexible. We're about 4 years in and we | had a working system up and running from "File -> New" after | about 6 months. All this during COVID. | | Another problem with big companies that I've seen is that | everything is done by committee and about 10 people need to | sign off on any little thing. It turns into an administrative | nightmare. | scruple wrote: | This sounds like Parkinson's Law applied to software | engineering organizations. I also wonder if the larger | organizations _actual_ goals have anything at all to do with | efficiency in software engineering / practices. I've been | inside of some very large teams (400+) and the stated goals are | never the real goals, they just happen to be aligned to some | degree and so it sort of works. | marcosdumay wrote: | In my experience you can always count on a team to do in just | an year what a single developer takes an entire week to finish. | | What absolutely does not mean that teams are useless. But that | choosing the correct size and composition for them is one of | the most important decisions for a project (right there with | "are we solving the correct problem?"). And "more is better" is | a completely wrong way to decide on it. | | Also, this doesn't make that one developer a "rockstar" or | whatever else you call it. | varjag wrote: | What happens though that the team of 100 still has the bus | factor of 10: those ten people who are doing disproportional | amount of work. | dagss wrote: | Perhaps some day someone will invent a way to get 20 to produce | the output of 10 + redundancy... | | One theory is: If you have just a little too many developers | (redundancy), they become bored and find ways to introduce | auxiliary complexities to keep things interesting, thus things | explode to 100 developers being needed... | cudgy wrote: | Have 2 teams of 10 develop the same thing and pick the best | one? | lanstin wrote: | Nothing more dangerous than a bored committer. | varispeed wrote: | > So, spend 10-50x less and get higher quality? | | This is why I say "rockstar" is a synonym for mug. Why won't | they pay those 6 developer 10-50x more? | | I've seen it many times. Young developers working their bottoms | off, creating a product that makes millions only to earn | average developer salary and then being laid off when company | gets new investment round. | | At the same time, through progressive taxation, taxman takes | (depending on the country) majority of earnings, so you won't | be able to amass capital to start your own business. | | This is the way how the rich captured the means of production | (developers) in wage slavery. | | You won't make it, unless gatekeepers let you. | com2kid wrote: | > In my career I have seen almost identical systems being built | by a) 6 developers in a startup in 1 year b) 100+ developers in | a big company with a much much larger budget in 2 years. | | The Microsoft Band golfing on device UI was built by 1 | developer in 2 or 3 months. | | The entire notification experience was 2 or 3 developers on and | off again for the product's lifecycle. | | The onscreen keyboard was a couple ML engineers and a software | engineer for a few months. | | The runtime it ran on was ~8 engineers, including all drivers, | board bring ups, custom file system, everything. | | Small teams can do amazing things, but they rely on good | leadership and on every member on the team being able to pull | their own weight. We had 1 person design+code the entire file | system, and as you mention, that put the bus factor at 1. | suzzer99 wrote: | We had a huge project with about 20 devs that went on for a | year and a half. We brought in a bunch of consultants. The | leads basically spent all day herding cats, and all night | coding. We all agreed we probably could have done it in half | the time with just the 5 leads. | swader999 wrote: | Ed Yordon I think said you can't make a baby in one month | with 9 people. More than six on a team and communication | overhead goes through the roof. | intelVISA wrote: | The hardest thing, as noted by others, is managing the | auxillary complexity -- which is often introduced by excess, | sometimes underskilled, developers. | | The 'good' (whatever that means) devs will waste more of | their time hacking around the above... so more devs are added | to compensate... repeat a few times: Fred's prophecy becomes | manifest. | molsongolden wrote: | This is a problem across many job functions. It's always | faster for "just the pros" to bang out a project or | deliverable but it's usually in the company's interest to | also be _training more pros_. | | Every more junior person on a project is going to be less | efficient than a senior person but they need to level up and | go through the apprenticeship phases to become a senior | person. | | Very small companies or teams can tactically choose to pay | more and only hire top talent but most places will need to | develop internal talent due to budget, recruiting, or bus | factor (business resiliency) constraints. | suzzer99 wrote: | The problem is most of these pros were high-priced | consultants who left as soon as the project finished. On | top of that some of the stuff they built was a huge dark | gray box to us for years. | dclowd9901 wrote: | Why don't companies have pros make things and non-pros | maintain those things after they're made? | molsongolden wrote: | Then the non-pros never have the opportunity to learn | from the pros and the pros never get a break which leads | to employee morale and retention issues + tacit knowledge | loss. | | Pros get burnt out being constantly called on to crank | out new features under pressure and never get to leverage | their deep understanding in the maintenance phase. | | Non-pros have no upward mobility (career progression) and | get burnt out struggling to understand and maintain | unfamiliar code without any guidance. | deepsun wrote: | Reasonable argument, I like it, however would add a bit | of salt: | | I've seen several times so far that people maintaining | things are actually doing a much better job, while those | who were granted honor of doing a new thing because hey | they are "pros". And once they did the prototype, they | are _considered_ even more "pros", because hey, they | wrote it. The people who rethought and rewrote the thing | later were real makers, but didn't get the appreciation | of "pros". | | The worst thing is that "pros" status keeps working for | itself, even while delivering worse job. I wouldn't have | a problem if the system could fix itself over time. | | Kinda related: "Confession of a so-called AI expert " | https://huyenchip.com/2017/07/28/confession.html | no_wizard wrote: | Companies big and small need better training both in the | initial phase and continuously. | | It astounds me that we don't see more investment in this | because it pays off quickly | rqtwteye wrote: | I struggle with that all the time. We have a lot of offshore | people and I am pretty sure that 3 experienced people could | take on a project that requires 50 offshore people and get it | done in less time at higher quality. | Clubber wrote: | I struggled with this a lot too. I came to the conclusion | that an offshore developer who as good as a good onshore | developer costs about the same, just due to supply and | demand, so it's a wash. If a company can't find or retain | talent, hiring a not great developer offshore is cheaper | than hiring a not great developer onshore. It's an "I give | up" strategy; you can build the same mediocre, buggy crap | cheaper offshore. Plus, off shore sales people are very | good and promise the world. Many traditional executives are | gullible when it comes to technology, but they're pretty | good at turd polishing, so that's also part of it too. I | also think OpEx vs CapEx accounting has a lot to do with it | as well. | treeman79 wrote: | 20 years in industry. Typical Offshore people have almost | always been a waste of time and just slowed down getting | anything useful done. | | Now, I've also hired internationally from all over world | and that has usually been fine. | intelVISA wrote: | It's not even a matter of competency: the consultancies are | there to oversell - you could have 100 great SWEs on the bank | project but it's doomed all the same if the internal only SPA | blog has its own nest of microservices. | cheekibreeki2 wrote: | It's a bit scary how much weight is put upon k8s and terraform | and how little actual skills these jobs require. I miss being a | sysadmin in this commodity world. | abecedarius wrote: | By the title I thought this would be about the early 80s and e.g. | this Electronic Arts ad/poster: | https://bytecellar.com/2009/09/30/i_started_life/ | [deleted] | fivre wrote: | software as auteur work succeeds when it's entering a vacuum. if | you're legit breaking open a field that's never been exposed to | it before, sure, go wild. those fields are fewer and far between | nowadays | | unlike creative industries, there's a fuckton of toil work that | just needs to be done automating processes. the playbook style | excels there, and unlike artistic work there's not really room | for memorable standouts that break the rules. | | music will always have the quality where good novelty is | impressive and breaks boundaries. business processes less so. | prince can (could) deliver a stellar rendition of purple rain | that breaks the bonds between heaven and earth even though you've | heard the song before, but ain't nobody delivering a stellar | automated check deposit workflow execution that stands out from | the rest. | | commodity services bring commodity work. this is fine. i do not | want my mobile check deposit to be a tour de force, i want it to | be something i don't give a second thought. there is beauty in | the blase' being blase' | marcrosoft wrote: | I stopped reading after the author criticized gofmt for being | boring. | shadowgovt wrote: | gofmt solves the right problem; complaints that it makes code | boring are misunderstanding code. | | If you want a different view on your code: write one. Code is | the model. Presentation of code in an editing UI is the view. | | Tools like gofmt normalize the model so that it's easier to | build a view that re-represents it. | bcrosby95 wrote: | I took the "boring tech" stuff differently. I choose technology | that makes my _production environment_ boring. | | Sometimes that means picking technology that is not mainstream. | Choosing mainstream technology is one of the best ways to make | your production environment decidedly not boring. | | I would argue Erlang is one of the most boring pieces of tech you | can pick. Look at how boring your production systems can get when | you choose that. | esafak wrote: | This article is all over the place; I got a neck ache trying to | follow it. I can't engage all the points, so I'll just address | the titular point. The software industry never exhibited the most | salient property of talent/creative industries: rockstar | economics. And that's a good thing. Otherwise a handful of | Carmacks and Deans would rake in all the money, leaving the rest | to man the Genius Bar until they got their "big break". | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner-take-all_market | | I agree with bullet points about keeping it simple and not using | crap tech for your MVP. | [deleted] | mgaunard wrote: | And yet 10x developers are a thing. | Hermitian909 wrote: | They are, and it's reflected in the compensation. I know a | developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total Compensation, he | turned it down for $10 mil from Google. | | It also exists in a much more banal state lower down the | ladder. I have friends who landed in the low end of the | developer market. They literally cannot do most of the work I | do. They don't understand DB isolation levels, they don't | have the skills to design systems around eventual | consistency, they are not familiar with basic distributed | system problems like clock drift, etc. I'm not even an | infrastructure engineer, this is just stuff I and my | coworkers need to get through our days to ship product code. | | Could my friends do this stuff? If they applied themselves, | sure! But they're not going to. It's also not enough to learn | on the job. We occasionally hire someone who doesn't actually | have the skillset and they usually flounder. | esafak wrote: | Was he paid for his superior productivity, or for special | skills? | hospitalJail wrote: | Why not both? | | I know a dude who got a nice package from a pizza company | to be CTO + lead programmer. I think he has a few people | under him, but the bigger deal was that he could get a | percentage of the $ saved. | | He worked all day and night to get LLMs to take orders, | in a month 40% of their orders are taken through the LLM. | For a company with 100s of stores, this is a huge cost | saving. | | Guy knows how to program, he knows technology, and he | knew the domain from a previous job. | q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: | > he could get a percentage of the $ saved | | I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I think I (and most | other decent engineers) can probably point to tens (or | hundreds) of millions of dollars in savings generated | over the course of a single career. | | As far as I can tell, it gets frittered away by empire- | builders who take that $ and spin up new teams for | nonsense. Kicking back a % to the engineers who harvested | all the savings seems like a _much_ better model. | jjav wrote: | > > he could get a percentage of the $ saved | | > I'd take that deal in a heartbeat. | | Same! That would be a very exciting and lucrative role. | Unfortunately it's basically the opposite of what the | industry does today. I think we've all seen the six- | figures per month AWS bills to power infrastructure for a | workload that could be comfortably hosted on a Raspberry | Pi. | | If the industry ever goes back to caring about efficiency | and cost, sign me up. | ryandrake wrote: | I think at that insane level, they pay is no longer | scaling linearly with the person's skills or | productivity. $10M is on the order of 100X a normal | developer salary. Is this person _really_ 100X as | productive? At these levels, salary de-couples from raw | skill and starts to depend more on culture checkbox | things like charisma, connections, celebrity, and ability | to bullshit/smoothtalk. Kind of like CEO salary. Nobody | thinks the CEO is actually 8000x more productive than a | normal employee. The CEO is in his position because he | has the "right" pedigree and the "right" network, went to | the "right" school, talks the "right" way, has the | "right" ivy league mannerisms, goes to the "right" polo | clubs. | | You and I and probably half of HN could do the job of | "CEO of a mid-size tech company." We don't, not because | of lack of ability, but because we don't tick those | culture/personality/background checkboxes. | | You're not going to leetcode-grind or PhD your way into a | $10M software engineering job. | Hermitian909 wrote: | Not to be facetious, what's the difference? | | At the high end of the white collar market you're paid to | deliver impact and your pay is determined by the quantity | of the impact and how differentiated it is (no big | bonuses for the guy who presses the "print a million | dollars" button). | esafak wrote: | It's easier to prove you have a special skill. They pay | you more because they can't hire a replacement. In the | other case, you have to prove how much better you really | are. Of course, the trouble with specialization is that | the skills take time to acquire and can be commoditized | or become obsolete with a paradigm shift. A more risky | proposition in tech than, say, medicine. | Hermitian909 wrote: | > They pay you more because they can't hire a replacement | | Sounds like the skills aren't very differentiated. IME | it's quite rare for a business to miss differentiation in | business impact in an order of magnitude. | | Going to your earlier question, the candidate in question | has many skills but is not overly specialized. He | commands that price because he can point at the right | place in the stack and say "There's $10 million in | savings here" when everyone else misses it or "Changing | the architecture in this way lets us ship 6 months | faster" and he is able to do this repeatedly. | quadcore wrote: | _I know a developer that Meta offered ~$6 mil Total | Compensation, he turned it down for $10 mil from Google._ | | Just to confirm, does that person code all day there? (real | question) | Solvency wrote: | Moreover, what is he coding. Because there is zero chance | in hell Google is getting a multiple of that cost back in | value from him. The value for them is that he's not | working for a competitor. That's it. | Dudester230602 wrote: | _> DB isolation levels_ | | Hmm, does come up every now and then. | | _> eventual consistency_ | | Have seen these event-based maintenance nightmares, trying | to steer clear wherever I can. | | _> clock drift_ | | Never met a developer who would at least hear about some | other developer for whom that would possibly ever matter. | manicennui wrote: | While there might be cases where it truly is reflected in | one's compensation, most of the time it is more like less | than double what others make. And they'll be promoted to | the point where they waste all of their time in meetings. | esafak wrote: | Are they? How do you know they are not 9x or 11x? It is hard | to say because the industry (and I live in Silicon Valley) | has no idea how to measure productivity. And this is | reflected in salaries. If we could accurately measure | productivity, we could compensate it, but we don't. | | "Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st | century management challenges." - Peter Drucker (the founder | of modern management) | hospitalJail wrote: | My performance is measured in $ saved. Its pretty obvious | your performance. | | We can take or reject projects, so if you are a bad | predicter of use/time to completion, you are going to do | worse. | esafak wrote: | It is hard to tie every job or action to revenue. Let's | say I'm a platform engineer who makes internal tools. I | generate no attributable revenue of my own; I make other | engineers more efficient. But how much? We can't run an | experiment where engineers don't use my platform because | it's mandated; directly using the PaaS is forbidden. | | Or I'm a manager. I help my engineers get work done. | Let's consider the happy case and assume we can measure | our team's revenue. How much of that revenue is | attributable to the manager's superior skill, and how | much to the rockstars under him/her? What would an | experiment look like; the engineers manage themselves, or | we compare with the previous manager? | | No company that I know goes this far. In their defense, | it is a challenge. An open problem, even. | q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: | > a platform engineer who makes internal tools | | You wouldn't run an A/B test to quantify your impact, but | you could pretty easily do before/after metrics (or just | collect them on the way during a graduated rollout) for | any feature you're rolling out. It should be | straightforward to quantify productivity benefit for a | large initiative. | | > How much of that revenue is attributable to the | manager's superior skill | | The output of a manager is the output of their team. We | can't A/B test managers (or at least, we probably | shouldn't), but we can look at a cohort of managers and | see how well their teams are generating business impact. | Combined with other data (e.g., upward feedback surveys, | level-skip 1on1s, retention metrics, etc.), we can | measure the impact of a manager. | esafak wrote: | > The output of a manager is the output of their team. | | People say that but it makes no sense. That means the | same manager would have a different "output" going from | one team to another. Are you going to cut his/her salary | if he leaves a big, successful team to help fix a | flailing team because it has less output? | | I get it: doing it this way is easy. My ideal is marginal | attributable revenue or profit. How much better are you | than the next person? We can haggle over the marginal | part but I'm not conceding on attribution. Otherwise | you're mooching off other people's work. Why are we | paying you the big bucks? Show me what _you_ did. | hospitalJail wrote: | Managers need to sign off on how many hours it saves. Its | their neck at the end of the day. | | It helps that we are often saving ~400 hours/yr spending | ~80 hours or less. | | We can also see it in overtime hours being eliminated, | and the (real) engineers are making more complex designs | but the size of the team hasn't changed.(30% more complex | in 2.5 years, same team size) They also havent replaced | engineers that left the team. | | Basically: We save enough hours that it is obvious. There | are added benefits like not having humans do manual | checks, so less prone to errors. (Although I argue that | our bugs are equally as dangerous) | jameshart wrote: | Saving $ is easy to measure. | | Making sure those $ saved didn't screw things up somehow | is the hard part to measure. | | And - this is going to blow your mind - but sometimes you | can actually make things more efficient by _spending more | money_. Cutting costs can be the exact opposite of the | right thing to do. | | So while I am jealous that your productivity can be | measured so simply, I'm dubious about how many | programmers' contributions can be so easily reduced to a | simple metric. | sb8244 wrote: | Not to beat a dead horse, but is 10x about 9x or 11x? Or is | it about "a magnitude more output than others" (10x)? | | You don't necessarily need to quantify that exactly. If | you've worked on a team with people like that, then you | know it. Their managers know it too. | | To your main point, the size of the markets is drastically | different. There is only so much room for headline | rockstars and entertainers, but there's way more room for | talented technologists. Having "rockstars" in the | engineering world doesn't really reduce the size of the pie | for others. | esafak wrote: | If you can't measure it, it might as well be 2x or "just | better". | | If you can't prove your superior productivity, you are | not going to get paid for it. Which is going to | incentivize you to optimize for your company's promotion | rubric instead, if you don't get fed up first. This leads | to the lamented "promotion-driven design". | | Or you can ditch the middle man and take your talents | straight to the market, through consulting or | incorporation. | mgaunard wrote: | You can definitely measure it. I've seen many times where | people were struggling with problems for months with tons | of operational incidents, before someone experienced came | in and solved it for good in a couple of days. | bee_rider wrote: | That sounds like "just better." | | Or it could just be somebody that happened to have a | crucial bit of domain knowledge. | | Or the original composition of the team could have | included some negative-contributors. | chinchilla2020 wrote: | Personally I think knowledge workers should be valued | for... well.... knowledge. Turns out it was in the name all | along. | | The person who understands and can solve your problems | effectively is more valuable than a clueless person who | cannot. It doesn't matter how many hours they spend in the | office. What matters is technical knowledge on the | sometimes confusing topics that arise at work. | tru1ock wrote: | You are just getting old. Nothing much has changed only your | perception of things. | joelmichael wrote: | I think "rock star" is a superficial term which is mostly poking | fun at some programmers for having long hair, liking rock music, | maybe even owning a guitar. | boredumb wrote: | The playbook works and the more boring the better. If you are | doing something on the edges of computing or industry than hooray | - you are off the beaten path and it's your time to shine! You | can be the one writing the playbook in a retrospective, but | please don't try to make a boring application in a boring | industry exciting by being unorthodox. I don't want to be excited | and interested in how you solved a basic CRUD implementation - I | want to intuitively know what it's doing before I even git clone | your repository. | marginalia_nu wrote: | I don't think you'll find metaphorical rock stars working in a | team in a salaried job, any more than you'll find actual Taylor | Swift doing ten hour shifts in an office building. There's nuance | to that though. It's really hard to distinguish yourself working | in such an environment, you don't have the time, freedom and | energy to do that. And if you can't do that, you won't ever be | much of a "rock star". | | Not that you can't work as an independent "creative" in | programming though. | | I've gotten to a point where I can work on Marginalia Search full | time, and live off grants and donations for at least a few years. | Dunno if I'm a rock star for it, I don't even have a Wikipedia | page, but I at least reckon myself a fairly successful busker. | | If I don't qualify, then certainly Serenity OS Andreas who made | like $300k in a week with his browser shenanigans. Him and a | other people far more talented than I am are able to live this | way. | | But it's a weird game. I think it's more or less all about the | right sort of visibility. You distinguish yourself working on | some large problem in a public fashion, and people inevitably | will start throwing money your way; this enables additional work | and additional visibility, it gives even more opportunities. | | While maybe not reaching the John Romero levels of rockstar we | had in the '90s, this manner of working is certainly closer to | the success of a Taylor Swift than being the most talented | developer in the IT department. | convolvatron wrote: | my first industry job was in 1995. after the interview process | the hiring manager came in with an offer. it was 4x what i was | currently making. after i accepted I had a half day with the | admin. | | she showed me the very nice hotel that they would be putting me | up at until I found a place. no hurry really. one of my new | coworkers was still there after a few months. | | we went back to the office for tastings. coffee. wine. beer. | whiskey. it was important that they knew my tastes and would | have my preferred food and drink on hand. | | i know that was the point - but I certainly felt like a rock | star. | euix wrote: | I started my first industry job in 2015 well after this and I | was still wined and dined the night before the interview. The | cocktails were $12, I had three, my future manager assured me | that there was nothing to worry about the next day. In my | last job, there was still lunch at a "$$$$" restaurant (at | least according to google reviews) after the on-site | interview. | | I once got flown out to Shanghai from NYC, all expenses paid | for 3 nights to interview for the China operations of an | European tech company. | | I guess everything is now different with remote work but | before the pandemic companies, especially your prospective | manager, would go out of their way to make you feel good if | they really wanted you. Those were the places you wanted to | work, even if the salary was higher somewhere else, because | you knew you would be privileged and respected before even | stepping in the door. That meant getting more resources, | having more leeway and freedom to do what you want. | | I also get the feeling hackers and "creative programmers" are | not as valued as much in today's market. Managers want "I" | shaped as opposed to "T" shaped hires. | Cyph0n wrote: | Man, the dot-com boom must have been wild. | js4ever wrote: | It was! I remember my first job in a startup in 1999, I was | third employee, arriving in a 2000sqm office... There was | so much money wasted, at that time the most important | metric was cash burn rate, to be serious player you should | be able to burn at least 1M per month, even with 3 | employees. | ryandrake wrote: | Plus, the managers really couldn't tell who knew what | they were doing and who didn't, so the money just sloshed | around to everyone. | | I remember a ridiculous TV commercial where a | stereotypical pointy-haired boss guy was talking about | hiring programmers, and he said "a candidate told me he | dreams in code, and... I hired him on the spot!" And it | was unironically framed as if the boss guy was doing an | amazingly smart thing! | | It was a crazy time. | pjmlp wrote: | It definitely was. | | During that time I was earning almost 2000 euros, in a time | where earning above 1000 euros was a dream for many | Portuguese. | | Wasting money on CDs, theatre, going out, travelling, first | time I managed to buy a desktop PC without being on | credit,.... | | Then came the dot-com crash. | twiddling wrote: | Money was just being thrown around. So many office strewn | with toys. | [deleted] | k__ wrote: | To be fair, some "best works" were commissions. | aidenn0 wrote: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel_ceiling being a | notable example. | hawk_ wrote: | > Serenity OS Andreas who made like $300k in a week with his | browser shenanigans | | Any sources for this claim? | marginalia_nu wrote: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36502433 | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377805 | | Ok technically 10 days, but still. | coldcode wrote: | In the 1980's, the About box of most applications (Mac and DOS | primarily) often listed most of the people who worked on them. | Many of the people were also known to others; I usually met many | at the precursor to WWDC. It was cool to see your name on | something you worked on (I worked on three apps over my two | startups, Trapeze, Persuasion, and Deltagraph). Some people got | to be pretty rockstar-like (I remember at the first WWDC (not | called that yet) in 1986 sitting on a boat with what felt like | all the Mac programmers in the world, a whole bunch of us aptly | listening to Silicon Beach's Charlie Jackson on how he recorded a | cricket for their first game). Because apps and programmers were | rare compared to today and something new, you had more of a | connection to the people who built things. Today you have no clue | and probably don't want to know. | jebarker wrote: | "When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, they had 35 engineers. | They were able to do this in part because they didn't "follow | playbook," and while you probably can't go that extreme..." | | Not my area of expertise at all but, 35 engineers for WhatsApp | sounds like a lot | grokx wrote: | What about several thousand engineers for Twitter then? =) | | Regarding WhatsApp, I would say that 35 engineers is OK. Not so | much, but not so few also. | suzzer99 wrote: | My project manager called me a rock star one time in a kick-off | meeting. My fellow programmers never let me live it down - | yelling out "rock star!" when they'd see me in the halls, "come | on rock star, fix your bug", "I dunno, let's ask the rock star", | etc. | swader999 wrote: | Trash your monitor in a fit of drunken rage or something like | that. Don't let them down. | Eumenes wrote: | you should start offering to autograph keyboards and mice | opportune wrote: | I disagree with a lot of this for a few main reasons. And some | minor ones | | Application development technology has considerably improved over | time - most applications simply do not need to reinvent the | wheel! Yes, over-engineering by designing something that will | never see more than 1qps to scale infinitely is bad - I'm sure it | happens but I think it's more a strawman. If you need a simple | CRUD application with a good-enough UI you have no need to | introduce additional complexity (and potentially maintenance, | reliability issues) with custom tooling. | | Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is basically | commodity development of crud apps, and technically complex novel | development. If you think there are no rockstars you might just | be in the commodity development scene. There literally are these | so-called "rockstars" being flown into SF to work on new stuff in | the ML sphere or into NYC/Chicago to work on bleeding edge | performance. Maybe the dissonance here is that the commodity | developer market has grown a lot, and that over time some | technology (like web applications - a lot harder to do at scale | in 2005 vs now) shifts from rockstar to commodity as it matures. | | Reverting to pets-not-cattle and statefulness can be appropriate | at low scale. But honestly this is more of a "choose the right | solution to the problem" thing and not a rockstar thing. | Following this model as you reach large scale allows for cool | production heroism and cowboy coding that makes you feel like a | true hacker, but that doesn't mean your users are getting a more | reliable experience, or that your dev time is being spent | efficiently. | | My minor quip is that, I think as you get more experienced what | you used to think of as rockstar development just looks routine | because you're better at writing software. | | Another minor point: you can't just engender a rockstar culture | at a company that hires commodity developers as easily as | asserted here. The big thing not mentioned: PAY. Nobody wants to | get paid like a commodity developer to have to perform like a | rockstar. Being a commodity developer is more chill and there is | less day to day risk and stress. Once you start getting towards | the bleeding edge or reinventing the wheel your work becomes | riskier and requires more mental effort and attention. | josephg wrote: | > Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is | basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically | complex novel development. | | I've been making this point for years. I think it's telling | that other nearby disciplines are bifurcated. Electrical | engineers vs electricians. Architects vs builders. Etc. The | virtues of a good electrician are that they're reliable, have | good customer service and they work efficiently. A good | building company can bring a building up in time and in budget. | But beautiful architecture work doesn't share those values. The | best architecture is bold and creative, and still has people | talking years later. | | I think this split already exists in programming. We just don't | admit it to ourselves. It's different work inventing React vs | using it to make a website. Inventing react, or rust, or redis | requires considered boldness. It takes time to nurture the | right insights to make it _right_. In contrast, the virtues of | a good web consultancy team look more like the virtues of an | electrician: Good customer service. Clear estimations. Work | delivered on time & on budget. | | But we're so enamoured with the idea of ourselves as "elite | hackers" that clock in / clock out programmers can't give up | the mantle. I get it. But it's stupid. There's no point | evaluating candidates on their ability to reimplement a btree | from scratch if their job is to style buttons. You're | evaluating people for a different job. Test their software | estimation skills. Their social skills. Ask about workflow and | productivity. | | Essays like this one ask "where did all the hackers go?". | They're still around, they're just harder to find now. They | went into weird crypto projects. Llama.cpp. Obsessive database | projects like scylladb. They're inventing rust, and finding | security vulnerabilities in io_uring for that sweet Google bug | bounty money. They're in the demoscene or making programmatic | art for burning man. | | Do you need real hackers at your company? It depends. Are you | making an apartment building (on time, on budget) or the Sydney | Opera House - which is iconic now, but was almost never | finished because of delays and creative disagreements? They | aren't the same kind of work. | hinkley wrote: | There aren't that many wheels that need inventing, even back in | the so-called rockstar era. | | > Two, the software talent market is bifurcated. There is | basically commodity development of crud apps, and technically | complex novel development. | | This I think is the source of most of the wheel invention. | Someone pays a good deal of money for 'talent' they do not | actually require, and they end up working at cross purposes. | Assign someone with cleverness to work on a crud app, and | they're bound to try to reinvent something, if not to keep | their resume fresh, at least to fight the boredom. | | But it's not bifurcation, it's trifurcation. It's not build or | invent, it's build, buy, or invent. We are too many of us | writing applications that were never really needed in the first | place. Not for any single reason, but a whole host of them, | from empire building, to rent seeking from people who could | have made a tool that adapted well to customers, but saw much | more money in keeping them engaged with you instead of | operating on their own steam. Open source is also driven by a | lot of motivations, but 'your own steam' is a pretty compelling | one. | trunnell wrote: | I think the "rock star" analogy did more damage to our profession | than most care to admit. Rock stars get treated a certain way, | they are catered to, their egos might get fluffed up, etc. None | of those behaviors are compatible with working in software teams, | and none of the "best" developers I know want to be treated that | way, anyhow. | | That said, I think this article is essentially correct. I would | put it like this: building information machines out of pure | information is a creative endeavor. Human performance tends to | fall on a bell curve, and IMO it's true for developer output in | particular. So if you want to create a hugely valuable solution | to a big problem, you should probably hire the best people you | can find and organize them in a way that lets them max out their | creative power. | | The main obstacle to this IMO is poor leadership attitudes & | practices. This article's author said it best in another post: | "Boring" is a good strategy if you think the bigger existential | risk for your company is that Product & Engineering will [...] | fail to ship a reliable product on a reliable schedule. But if | you're more afraid of the business risks of shipping average | product, at an average cadence, over the course of years, you | should consider deviating, at least sometimes, from the playbook | whose entire definition is "optimized for safety." | | https://morepablo.com/2022/04/against-boring.html | kandel wrote: | The rock star thing is a bit creepy. I'd like to be good at my | job but not have the job turn into my entire life. Why does the | conversation around tech imply that software jobs are either | grey prisons or stress balls? Methinks reality is a bit more | complex, but i'm just an undergrad. | | Same thing with math academy honestly. | dogleash wrote: | There's threads of a few interesting ideas in here, unfortunately | the presentation teed them up for the current cultural mythos to | obliterate them. | | A number of years ago, the uptight cultural conformity of the | valley bubble branded itself with some of the imagery the author | attempts to borrow. The collective consciousness hasn't forgotten | how that image was power-blasted away. It was done as cover to | sneak in a bunch of orthogonal changes while nobody was looking, | but that part's neither here nor there. Forget I even mentioned | it. The end result is that we're here now and we have the tools | to evaporate this article with one shot at 50 paces. | 3dsnano wrote: | i hired a true rockstar once. they were the smartest developer i | have ever worked with, ever. this individual could singlehandedly | put together massive systems, from technical to design, with | confidence and flair. | | i had to let this person go because they did not know how to work | with others. beyond their brilliance, they could simply not | empathize with the organization's POV. everything was about them, | supporting them, making them feel special, unique, and important. | | this individual eventually returned the company laptop, which was | bent in half. they told me that they had smoked enough DMT to | understand that they had created their own god and that if my org | needed further investment, to reach out to them. | | i hired this person from HN "who wants to be hired." they still | (to this day) add a post to the monthly thread. | yuy910616 wrote: | These industries just have a different mechanism, here is an | example: the worlds 10,000th best tennis player probably makes $0 | dollar from tennis, and the world's top 0.1% of pharmacists make | maybe twice as much as the 50th percentile. | | Some industries you either are the top 0.01% and make millions; | in some industries being average means a decent living. | | Software has long transitioned from one end of that spectrum to | something more towards the middle. Super star developers simply | aren't productive enough for the demand of software | cracrecry wrote: | The grass was always greener in the past / Cualquier Tiempo | pasado fue mejor. | | Pure creative programming work have always been a small subset of | programming in general. Were COBOL programmers creative? Data | Base programmers? IBM programmers? Those were the majority of | software jobs in the past. | | I have been mostly a pure C,Verilog, VHDL, analog digital | electronics -low level engineer for a long time before becoming | entrepreneur and using much higher level languages in our | company. Was it creative? A lot. I interacted with machines like | robots that did things like moving 20 tons or lasers or robots or | whatever. | | Was is painful, tedious and boring?. It was, also. | | You need to make it rain using active work of whatever is | necessary for your job. The fact that something is not "sexy" is | a great advantage for a job as it removes most of the | competition. Being hard scares most people. | | The best advice I could give young people is to find hard | problems and to find the techniques and tools that could make | those problems easier. We use psychology and things like lisp as | secret weapons. | | Thinking in the 35 people that created Facebook is extremely | misleading, because fb got extremely lucky, and they were | hundreds of thousand of programmers working in other companies. | The monetary success of fb has a lot more to do with free money | created by central banks than anything the founders created as | their technology was easy to replicate but its financing was not. | | There are intense opportunities today like they were in the past. | But they are hard, like it was hard in the past. | cudgy wrote: | "Were COBOL programmers creative? Data Base programmers? IBM | programmers? Those were the majority of software jobs in the | past." | | Some of those jobs surely had creative aspects to them ... far | more creative than the recent YAWS (yet another website) using | ASWF (another shiny web framework) with all the bells and | whistles included. | disgruntledphd2 wrote: | Facebook was founded in 2004, well before interest rates became | zero. | mbgerring wrote: | One interesting thing to note: whether you think software should | be more like a "talent/creatives" industry, or more like a trade, | one thing both of those models have in common is _unions_. | tehjoker wrote: | The transition from a new growth industry to a mature industry | under conditions of nearly interest free loans and low aggregate | consumer demand. In this essay, it seems clear that the kinds of | designs matter a bit, but lots of companies choose different | technologies and practices and survive. | | The obvious conclusion is that market conditions matter more than | the technology stack for a space of "reasonable" choices about | it. I expect, until the next big thing hits, the market | conditions to be dominated by consolidation. Bitcoin was supposed | to bit it, but that was a scam. VR was also a scam (Zuck tried to | sell us non-existent real estate), but maybe it'll turn into | something more useful soon. | 082349872349872 wrote: | > _under conditions of nearly interest free loans_ | | I'm hoping higher interest rates may revive the older style: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34565816 | varelse wrote: | [dead] | Zetice wrote: | This is written in the style of someone who worships software | development, but is not themselves a professional developer and | therefore has spent zero time working on a team to build | something more complex than, say, a webpage. | | I recognize the author is a professional developer, and seemingly | has worked on teams to build complex things, but it appears as if | they forgot how the human machine works, and are now stuck on | some kind of nostalgia trip where everyone involved in the | process is somehow like them and only able to gain energy through | self expression in their software engineering work. | | I do wonder sometimes if there's something about living in SF or | NY that makes you forget how tiny your perspective actually is. | awkward wrote: | The silly part of this is that the industries he compares | software to - music, television, movies - have all been | skeletonized and reduced to minimal and repeatable products. | Simply looking out the door should be enough to convince you that | if you want to bring back the magic, asking to be treated like a | television writer isn't the way. | | Right now the biggest thing bringing down developer wages is the | threat of being replaced with an LLM. That's not going to work | out in the long run - giving developers productivity increasing | tools isn't going to lessen their value. However, it's the most | plausible wage suppression hustle for quite some time. | | Until the limits of LLM generation get tested and felt, the | downward pressure on wages is going to continue. Maybe when the | first wave of LLM driven startups feel the pain of maintaining | code that doesn't have an author, or maybe high profile malicious | training data attacks will do it. Even afterwards, the effects of | the wage curve being bent downward for a couple years are still | going to be there. | EddieJLSH wrote: | Just look at the success of the Superhero franchises in | Hollywood | srpablo wrote: | Author here. | | Well, sure, but to the contrary: DC has had a much harder | time imitating Marvel's success, even with great IP. | Universal tried to create the "Dark Universe." And even | Marvel is having trouble cranking out the hits with the | middling success of Ant-Man Quantumania, Thor: Love and | Thunder, and Wakanda Forever. | | I suspect making these things more streamlined and more of a | flat cultural paste through the Disney Machine is a part of | the lower outcomes. | awkward wrote: | I think if we want to talk about the actual value of messy | human processes, you're on the nose. The problem is that | large, entrenched industries can function using a | distorted, rationalized model for a lot longer than any of | us can afford to just wait around. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-29 23:00 UTC)