Comments for Knowing .NET

Comment on Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” by larry

larry — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:51:51 +0000

@blizzard Do you have any references to the structure of the software teams at Apple? I think you’re probably referring to the control that Jobs himself exercised. While he was undoubtedly a master of product design, he didn’t write production code.

Comment on Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” by blizzard

blizzard — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:47:14 +0000

‘Super-programmer teams have been tried and have shown no compelling benefits’ – except the legendary small teams used by Steve Jobs to produce some very successful software.

Comment on Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” by Mike

Mike — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:54:12 +0000

Whether the top programmer is 10x better than the median is not the question that matters. What really matters is how many people on the team are negative producers, and how strong their powers are (and whether management will refuse to get rid of them, etc).

No one who’s worked on software projects over time can have missed the spectacular power of such people to wreak destruction.

Comment on “Moneycode” not “Developernomics”: My Hunch as to the Distribution of Software Excellence by John Stovin

John Stovin — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:10:42 +0000

I recall hearing similar stuff about the Banking industry. Banks think they have to pay big money to hire ‘star performers’, but a lot of evidence indicates that performance is very context sensitive, and these people seldom perform as well in their new context. As you say, its much better (and cheaper!) to focus on improving the talent you have rather than trying to hire superstars.

Comment on “Moneycode” not “Developernomics”: My Hunch as to the Distribution of Software Excellence by Jonathan Clarke

Jonathan Clarke — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:03:33 +0000

I think there’s another factor that supports your case: productivity given comfort in the domain. If I can pick the problem, I may be able to look 10x faster than you. If you pick the problem, you will probably look 1000x faster than me. To maintain Superprogrammer status would mean sticking with one domain and technology. But we need to move on, learn something new, work on a new project. If there is a Superprogrammer, then they’re a scared-to-move-on show-off!

Comment on Why 10x Ticks Me Off by larry

larry — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:58:47 +0000

To repeat myself, I have no problem with saying that an excellent developer is 10, 100, or 1,000,000 times more productive than a shitty programmer. That is not the issue, because it’s a sad fact that bad programmers and troubled organizations can have literally zero progress, or even be in a situation where they are making things worse due to their flailing. The issue is how much better than _median_ the very best programmers are. It’s my opinion that half of all programmers are quite a bit better than the average programmer (that is, that the sad reality of shitty programmers drags down the average) and that the best programmers are still a significant factor better than the median (but not 10x and I believe that, when people talk about 10x programmers, they are often citing a context-sensitive situation such as the author of a library being its undisputed master or a person who’s written a dozen parsers being given a parsing task). I believe that most people who say “I’ve seen 10x programmers all the time” are either comparing an excellent programmer with quite-bad programmers or not recognizing that the excellent programmer might not have the same advantage in a different context.

Comment on Why 10x Ticks Me Off by Dmitriy

Dmitriy — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:22:46 +0000

I disagree. The 10x programmer is trying to describe the difference between the effective programmer vs not. There is no “the 10x programmer will learn things 10x as fast” in fact that person may learn things slower than the shitty programmer. The 10x programmer is a programmer that produces 10x the value for the same amount of time as the 1x programmer. They are the ones who make the frameworks that do in 2 lines what takes 50. Given that they don’t produce more code, they don’t learn faster, they don’t anything faster. Their solutions just tend to be better. And while initially the 1x developer may deliver in approximately same amounts of time, the 10x developer has less maintenance work.

The gain is overall. I worked with a 1x and 10x developer simultaneously. I saw them both deliver in approximately same time. However the 10x’s work was extensible, reusable, few lines of code. The 1x guy’s was unreadable. We decided that after a version 1 it was easier to rewrite it now than wait for it to break and fix it, or even try to understand it. THATS where the difference is. 10x = 10x the productivity, not 10x the speed of any individual task.

Comment on Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” by larry

larry — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:49:51 +0000

@ewb This might also be a good place to state that I believe that the software industry has changed dramatically since the Internet boom and I think that, at this point, both the composition of the professional programming industry and the ways in which software is built by the industry are quite different to those things in the 60s-early 90s. I think, in general, software practices are much better than they used to be and that the knowledge of good practices is much more broadly distributed. So it may not be very worthwhile to see what can be parsed out of data generated before the rise of the Web.

Comment on Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” by larry

larry — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:36:56 +0000

@ewb McConnell defends 10x best:worst (although he notes that studies generally throw out “did not complete”). I think he generally defends best:median more in the 5x range (which I think is still too high). He is clear that he believes that team-based advantages can be learned. Although his list of citations may initially look decent, there is a noticeable criticism by Laurent Bossavit http://www.readability.com/articles/5egv0hme?legacy_bookmarklet=1 (I’ve known McConnell for 20 years and feel the aspersions against him are incorrect, but the criticism of the citations has validity). This would be a good point to also acknowledge that Capers Jones work also needs to be read and can be misinterpreted to support very high variances, but only if one ignores context (i.e., if one compares the rate at which large systems are built versus the rate at which small systems are built, you might say “companies that build small systems are 10x (or whatever) more productive than companies that build large systems.” It is certainly true that small systems are very much easier on a per-LOC basis than large systems: but that is an apples-to-oranges comparison).

Comment on Forbes is wrong about “Developernomics” by ewb

ewb — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 17:07:26 +0000

Regarding: “…there is not a shred of evidence that the best professional developers are an order of magnitude more productive than median developers at any timescale, much less on a meaningful timescale such as that of a product release cycle”, McConnell has compiled a number of study sources over the years that suggest otherwise:

http://tinyurl.com/353svp

“…the general finding that ‘There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers’ has been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000).”