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Comment by vonmoltke | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately, it is Clyde who will have the better-looking resume and portfolio (will Alice even have a portfolio?), Clyde who will be held up as the exemplar of the "10X engineer", and Clyde who will be getting his choice of job offers. Meanwhile, Alice will be toiling away wondering why she can't even get any interviews despite the "talent shortage".

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Clyde has better experience of actually developing programs. He has exercised and demonstrated his technical skills. For someone who actually needs new programs developed, these skills may help to deliver a substantial amount of business value. For someone who doesn't need the new programs but is poorly incentivized to care, Clyde is also adequate.

Alice may have a fine future in consulting, but if her projects never demonstrate hard-to-find technical skills no one's going to pay hard-to-find-technical-skill money for her efforts later.

Developing new programs is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The need is to solve problems. Sometimes the best solution is to write new programs, sometimes the best solution is to modify existing programs, sometimes the best solution is to tweak off-the-shelf programs.

If you select for people who are good at, and like, writing new programs, then every solution becomes a new program. That isn't the best way to run a business.

So what you're saying is that its better to ultimately move into management ?

for Alice, and possibly also Bob, yes, their career advancement is most likely from software developer to product manager or technical lead, to VP of engineering somewhere.

for Clyde, definitely not. Clyde really loves coding as an end unto itself. his career advancement is probably getting picked up as a "unicorn" at a quant trading hedge fund, or joining a project that is coding low-level technology infrastructure at a big tech company like Goog/Msft/FB/Oracle/whatever.

> Developing new programs is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Yeah, so this is just another case of the principal-agent problem. The thing which is best for you as a programmer may not always be the thing which is best for the company paying you. You'll have to find a balance between the two, and so will your employers.

This is a good point. I think the need for new programs has actually decreased relative to the overall need for software solutions over the past, say, twenty years. Between the rise of open source and the fact that lots of software products being built aren't very technically innovative I suspect the relative need for new code has decreased. It's more often about broadly figuring out how best to solve problems.

I wouldn't be surprised if, in response to this trend, we see the formalization of a new "product developer" role at startups that is kind of a hybrid engineer / product manager. This person can code perfectly well, but is also scrappy and really good at getting shit done. The Alice character in the story above would fit this role perfectly. These people can drive way too much business value for their role not to become a defined hiring target eventually.

why on earth would you let your developers decide what to develop? Isn't that the role of the product owner/client/management? There should be some back and forth between stakeholders.

I say this as a developer who, if it were up to me, would just spend all day refactoring existing code and not implementing new features or fixing bugs.

Actually, since we all have a finite amount of time, it's entirely possible Alice has solved real problems with the rest of hers whilst Clive is reinventing the wheel.

For the 99% business he's an expensive liability. Sure he might get jobs, but he'll hardly have a career backed by success.

> Clyde has better experience of actually developing programs.

Agreed. In this specific case Alice was in the right, but there are only so many problems that can be solved by installing Wordpress.

You don't have anything to back that up, though. You know Clyde will make work when he doesn't have to. You don't know what Alice does in the time she has not spent creating a redundant CMS.

Clyde's portfolio will have "built a custom cms from scratch" and then in my interview I'll ask why from scratch instead of using a framework and something like Pinax or one of the Rails CMS packages.

Bob will have "built custom cms on Rails/Django/CakePHP" I'll ask why him the same questions as I asked Clyde along with why he didn't use Drupal or Wordpress or ...

Alice's portfolio will have more in it that just "set up WP site". In fact it probably won't have that in it at all but it might come up during the interview: "Oh, the marketing site? Yeah, I just fired up a wordpress instance, themed it, got backups working and passed it over to IT and got back to my day job."

And then ask, "what was your day job, because I don't need a wordpress themer."

I guess what I'm saying is that if your resume consists of setting up Wordpress sites, then you better like setting up wordpress sites because that's where your experience is.

Your missing my point entirely. This is what the resumes look like.

Clyde: Spent 6 months writing a custom CMS in Perl in support of Project X.

Bob: Spent 2 months writing a custom CMS in Rails to support Project X. 4 months writing feature A and B for Cool Project X while continuing to support the CMS.

Alice: Spent 6 months writing feature A, B, C and D for Project X.

If I was looking for a developer for Project Y, who looks better?

Except in this example the CMS /is/ Project X, not part of supporting Project X

And you gave zero requirements for what you need in Project Y

So I have no idea and no way of knowing who looks better. Maybe Project Y just needs a CMS to go with it. Maybe Project Y needs an extremely custom web application with niche needs.

I think you just barely touched on the lunacy of even debating who has the better resume. You need to actually talk to them and understand what their real experiences are. Besides how do we not know that Alice is actually a major contributor to WordPress or optimizes compression algorithms on the side for fun.

Then in that case, Alice will have features A, B, C, and D of Project Z. She won't have wasted time developing a system that didn't need to be developed in the first place.

I guess all this rests on the assumption that Alice did something relevant in all that time she saved. If features A, B, C and D. Basically you seem to assume that each or some of those are relevant software development work and not just more WordPress deployments.

I guess the point is use pre-packaged tools when possible. But somebody has to write new software, so you better get some experience in doing that if you want to be a software developer.

This argument has taken the original scenario completely out of context. You could as easily twist this and say.

Alice was part of a small team in a Space Tourism start-up. Once their marketing site was online she got back to the rocket science.

Instead of "Used APIs X, Y, and Z and languages Foo and Bar", Alice's resume will say "Delivered project on time and under budget that brought in $X,000,000 in revenue to the company."

There are certainly companies looking for the latter.

The story is simplified. The 10x engineer is usually someone who has the technical skills and knows have to deploy them effectively. The 10x finishes the Wordpress site and then moves on to the next task, and the next, and the next completing them efficiently, even though some require technical skills and some do not.

I feel like much of high level engineering work isn't having knows (sic), at least beyond a certain level. It's being able to grok a narrow problem domain from first principles, write code, then forget it to learn a different narrow problem domain the next week.

True. 10X is productivity in the context of business value. Clyde will take six months before he can deliver something of value while Alice will have solved ten more business problems with within that same time period.

The key differentiation is: is the company a technology company (Clyde's approach is more valuable) or not (Alice's approach is more valuable).

Clyde will have one thing on his resume. Solved the CMS problem.

Alice will have plenty of other things to put on her portfolio instead and should show the 10x other things she fixed with all the time freed up.

Alice is going to have other projects on her portfolio because she didn't spend a year building a CMS like Clyde did.

In my experience people like Alice have resumes full of novel things, rather than a bunch of B2B-sounding internal apps.

Seems unlikely. "Built my own CMS" is not uncommon on resumes and isn't a big draw. Presumably Alice has other accomplishments from the 99% of time she didn't use writing her own CMS.

Clyde is a sous chef at the French Laundry. Alice works the grill at Applebees.

Other way around. Because Alice set up Wordpress and was done, she had plenty of time to work on actual, hard problems that needed to be solved.

You are assuming she is given the chance to work on actual hard problems.

Why do you think Clyde wrote a custom cms in the first place? You think he didn't know about Wordpress? In reality he knew but pushed for the custom implementation because it was the best route to improve his skills and increase his power within the company.

The truth is at a typical company Alice isn't going to be rewarded either financially or with better projects.

I wish it was different but if they both worked at the same company Clyde would be the one taking first pick of all the best projects.

You're my hero right now.

Alice will be able to provide a list of employment and value added to the business.

People, who read that, know what they are getting same as they do the prolific developer with a nice portfolio.

Both are high value. It's all in the presentation for Alice.

Technical Consultants and Solution Architects make more than Coders or Programmers. The main value of Alice's approach & solution is time - the quick turnaround in providing the right solution.

Maybe - but I know which of my ex-colleagues Clyde, Bob, or Alice _I'd_ be calling up and poaching when I needed to build myself a new team in my next role…

Alice will have several orders of magnitude more projects on her CV than Clyde has.

When Alice is applied to a harder problem (that can't be solved with Wordpress), she'll be able to solve it far faster and more effectively than Clyde because she won't have the not-invented-here hubris and will stand appropriately on the shoulders of giants to construct something that will likely be far more maintainable, broken down into saner components, and on the whole, more effective.

Clyde will be valued as a 10x engineer at his company forever, but would probably find it very difficult to start somewhere else where he doesn't have the luxury of having written the entire codebase.

You're assuming Alice only sets up Wordpress, and isn't doing anything else with all the extra time she has on her hands.

And quite frankly, a portfolio with yet another CMS hand made is not impressive at all. I'd ask the same thing: "Why didn't you use Wordpress, or another off the shelf solution?"

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