cyberpunkdyst

Did you consider building on top of some existing open source solutions like Docmost, Appflowy, or AFFiNE?

Yes. Companies that are not able to produce as much value per engineer will likely be driven out of business. This will not happen overnight, as there are likely more in-experienced engineers available (at least for a short amount of time). The too inexperienced team will in some cases lead to the company not being able to compete with their product and slowly dying.

#1 Requires some knowledge to do, which can be hard. I do agree that #2 is very true and indeed what I mean by bein stupid is ”exposing your own stupidity/lack of knowledge” rather than playing stupid.

The post includes basically a single benchmark and is from the blog of a company with the tagline "EDB Supercharges PostgreSQL".

PostgreSQL is absolutely the best DB out there (if I'd have to pick just one), but this is not the best article showcase why.

Their valuation in June 2019 was around $400M, which makes this a 20x increase in less than 2.5 years. Quite impressive and a great example on the effects of COVID to digital business.

In Finland 18% of all energy is produced with Nuclear, which almost the double of the global average (~10%). We don't have earthquakes or other very strong weather phenomena (apart from freezing temperatures up to -40C/-40F), which makes Nuclear a very feasible option.

> Surprisingly, the cost includes “lost” contributions from community members who had accounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzed by the (often low quality) contributions from those without accounts.

The best way to get high-quality feedback is to say something stupid and have the expert correct you.

Both 1 & 2 are valid strategies for underdog consultancies. Consultancies that are very good at #2 may also have better ability to keep people, who are exceptionally good at some specific tech or domain, because they usually have higher rates and peers that are good at the same thing.

As for product-minded engineers, there is often more freedom at a smaller a consultancy than in (many) product companies. You can switch projects every 3-18 months, select a new technology you want to learn, have big ownership on the helping the customer building the product, etc. To some people this is ofc a downside and a lot depends on the kind of client/project you're working in. Much of this also is lost, when the consultancy starts taking on bigger projects with bigger clients that already have much of these things set in stone.

In my experience the difference between good consultancies and average product companies is not very big. On average I've seen consultancies being able to attract more technically curious and product-minded engineers. The exception are the product companies that are somehow special in the market (e.g. can offer a significantly better pay, or do something very interesting in terms of scale or technologies).

The dynamic you describe tends to get stronger, when consultancies grow. The voices & competence of the technical people becomes less important when it comes to the business and efficiencies in utilization and the company brand start to matter more. The consultancy I worked at was not an incumbent, but an underdog competing with the big players, so the actual execution mattered more, when trying to win bigger customers. Even in consultancies, there are operational effiencies you get from having competent people. Mainly from having less middle management & account managers.

However, there things are useful for the consultancy's business only to a limited extend. You only need to be slightly better than the average consultancy and you're OK. So there is a point, when you either need to be great at sales or thought-leadering, or a consultancy can no longer increase your salary or provide your with work you find interesting.

This is based on my limited personal experience observing the careers of people I know, whom I could consider somehow exceptionally good at their craft. I co-led the CTO team of software consultancy with 350+ devs. In that role it was pretty clear that it was really hard to compete on salary and how interesting projects experts could be offered.

Motivations differ based on what the person values. The top motivations I've experienced are:

- Money

- Following intrinsic motivation and being able to grow professionally

- Friendships and the feeling of belonging

- Stability and not taking any risks

The people in the last two categories tend to change jobs more slowly in my experience, but most still do it at some point.

I'm not aware of any reliable studies on the subject from the field of software engineering. If someone knows one, I would be more than interested in reading one.

Author here. There definitely are people, who perform better than others, even when the environment is not built to favor them and hinder others from performing well.

If we believe that the talent within a field follows the power law, as suggested by this study (http://www.hermanaguinis.com/PPsych2012.pdf) it means that only 20% people in the field are high-perfomers, and something like less than 5% exceptionally high performers. When you look it from the perspective of scaling an organization it means that getting these people to your company will be very hard. 80% of companies are hiring within the "average or below average" section. The truly high-performing people, who are passionate about their craft are very likely to move to companies that are at the at the top of XYZ, where XYZ is the topic within software engineering that they're especially passionate about, pay well, etc.

There was originally a section the article that tried to highlight "statistics", but I eventually left it out, because I did not find a good place for it:

"Statistically speaking, it is much easier to create a "10x engineer" by creating an organization, where most people perform poorly than actually hire and retain someone, who really is 10x better at software engineering than an average person."

In hindsight, I think there are a few things that could have been emphasized more, so the thrust of the blog post would have been clearer:

- The title could have been better frased around the topic.

- The context is companies that are growing fast and need to scale.

- You likely have a company full of close-to-average people.