19. The 10x Engineer Myth

Will Larson on Greater Than Code, Marcus Blankenship on Software Engineering Radio, Sonal Chokshi on Software Engineering Daily, Roman Pichler on Being Human, and Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on Hanselminutes.

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This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 2, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers.

WILL LARSON ON GREATER THAN CODE

The Greater Than Code podcast featured Will Larson with hosts Jessica Kerr, Arty Starr, and Rein Henrichs. Will talked about systems thinking, specifically referencing Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer. As a sixteen-year-old, he was exposed to systems thinking by his economics professor father. They talked about how to bring about change in complex systems and Rein brought up Virginia Satir’s change model. 

They talked about various forms of dysfunction, with an example being tasks that are marked as completed by developers without first doing the work of validation. Will’s own example is that executives never miss their goals; they just redefine the goals so that they hit them. There is a certain level of seniority where you can never be held accountable because you are the accountability function.

Getting back into the topic of how to change complex systems, Will referenced the book, The First 90 Days as a great explanation of the need to go slow and observe before you try to change things. He says that the “great man theory” has been out of style for decades in the study of history, but is still in style in tech as the most causal way to understand how change works and also the most comforting.

Rein talked about how the heroic individual myth is the other side of the coin to the scapegoat. Just as you pile all the blame onto the scapegoat, you pile all the credit onto the hero. He says that cultures that engage in hero myth-building are also likely to engage in scapegoating.

Will says he himself has not seen much scapegoating at the companies he works at, likely because those cultures were unwilling to hold folks accountable for their work, but he has seen the hero myth at every company he has worked. Will then spoke about the 10x engineer myth.

Will says he meets people who have been in tech for six or seven years who have the idea that they are almost done with their career. It may be due to the “senior engineer after two years” phenomenon where the career path is not well-defined and a lot of companies don’t know how to take advantage of the skills of people with 15 to 20 years of experience. A second reason is that the industry is an overwhelming and draining environment and people choose to opt out of it. As a result, we have very few engineers who have been around long enough to witness the long-term consequences of their brilliant ideas.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/142-modeling-constraints-in-human-systems-with-will-larson/id1163023878?i=1000446345964

Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/modeling-constraints-in-human-systems

MARCUS BLANKENSHIP ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING RADIO

The Software Engineering Radio podcast featured Marcus Blankenship with host Travis Kimmel. They talked about motivation, specifically motivation of engineering teams. Marcus says that motivation is the desire to get things done and every engineer coming out of school is motivated from day one. If you get one of these people hired onto your team and, two years later, they are demotivated, suffering from PTSD, scared to offer ideas, and figuring they are just a cog in a machine, your problem is your company or your team, not the engineer you hired.

Marcus says he is doing secret research on motivation as he is now interviewing candidates for a job and asking them why they are looking to leave their current job. Nobody says, “Pay.” Often the answer is a lack of alignment with their boss or their company, resulting in the engineer losing the desire to contribute because of a relationship problem.

These engineers are not stick-in-the-muds that are angry they don’t get to use COBOL anymore. Something happened where instead of having their ideas valued and heard and being part of the discussion, they somehow got disconnected from their boss.

In the seventies, Marcus says, researchers discovered a strong correlation between positive employer-employee relationships and the amount of job satisfaction, quality of work, turnover intentions, and amount of promotions. We are thirty-five years into a few thousand scientific studies that continue to prove that the relationship one has with one’s supervisor matters more than any other factor when it comes to job performance and job satisfaction.

Marcus says that a supervisor’s one true job is to create a trusting relationship with the people that report to you. Travis shared his own experience in having one-on-ones with his supervisors that felt to him like they were trying to artificial manufacturing a relationship because there was no indication of what the goal of the meeting was. 

Marcus says that good one-on-ones are bi-directional. One-on-ones in which the boss just gets status updates from the subordinate and gives new marching orders are often dissatisfying for both parties. Another flawed kind of one-on-one is where it is all about the employee. Such one-on-ones are not effective and neither party likes these either.

Marcus suggests that we apply to our one-on-ones the same Agile thinking that we apply to our work. Every month, at one of your one-on-ones, do a retro on the one-on-one. Talk about why you are doing them, what value you’re getting from them, and how to make them better.

They talked about psychological safety. Marcus says a lot of managers don’t realize that they are not in a good position to measure psychological safety based on their own gut. He says tools like Claire Lew’s knowyourteam.com, officevibe.com, and other anonymous survey tools can help.

When we become a manager or team lead that has you supervising or leading, we forget that we are in a position of power. Travis added that leaders need to be careful about what they say casually so that it doesn’t get taken as a mandate.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/id120906714?i=1000445260176

Website link: https://www.se-radio.net/2019/07/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/

SONAL CHOKSHI ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY

The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured a16z podcast host Sonal Chokshi with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started out by asking why a VC firm decided to start a podcast. Sonal says that a16z has always had a culture of writing, blogging, and sharing ideas. This led them to develop an editorial operation from which the podcast naturally followed.

Jeff asked what lessons from blogging apply to podcasting. Sonal sees podcasting as the next evolution of blogging because of its similar intimacy and a similar feeling of authenticity. The difference, she says, is that podcasting is a community and a movement. 

Sonal talked about her favorite a16z episodes, including an episode on emojis. She loved it because everybody understands how to use emojis but there is a lot of deep tech and governance involved in making emojis possible. That episode, she said, encapsulates the whole a16z podcast: the intersection of technology, people, politics, context, culture, and humanity. 

Jeff brought up a16z’s connection to Mike Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency. Having read Ovitz’s book and noticed how it portrays Ovitz as a workaholic, Jeff asked Sonal how she finds balance while drinking from the addicting technological firehose. Sonal says there is a lack of nuance in the debates about screen time and work/life balance.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/id1019576853?i=1000446547922

Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/08/09/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/

ROMAN PICHLER ON BEING HUMAN

The Being Human podcast featured Roman Pichler with host Richard Atherton. Richard asked Roman what a product manager is. Roman says a product manager is someone who takes an idea and helps bring it to life, launch it, make it successful, and keep it successful.

Richard asked about the distinction between a product manager and Scrum’s notion of product owner. Roman sees the product owner as a product management role, but methodologies like SAFe have redefined the product owner to be a tactical role, misunderstanding the intention behind the role and the practicalities such as answering questions from the dev team, refining backlog items, and answering support and sales questions. He says there is too much focus on the details and this risks losing sight of the big picture.

To do a good job for users and for the business, Roman says it is helpful to have people looking after digital assets with the right qualifications, skills, organizational support, authority, and autonomy.

He says the term “mini-CEO” appeals to some product people because it indicates that product people need a certain level of authority, but a CEO would have marketing and sales functions under their control and product people do not.

Richard asked what talents Roman had to develop to be a great product person. Roman started out as a programmer and began to help business groups come up with new products. What helped him most was to boost his own understanding of how business works and the second most important element was letting go of being interested in how digital products work and focusing instead on who benefits from them.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/72-to-manage-products-is-to-care-with-roman-pichler/id1369745673?i=1000446514943

Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/9b2501e7-e618-46f6-8f41-abd69c871211.mp3

DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON HANSELMINUTES

The Hanselminutes podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started by asking whether Dave and Andy knew at the time they wrote the Pragmatic Programmer 20 years ago that they were writing what would become a seminal work. Dave said that both of them were stunned by its success. The book was intended as a way to clarify their own thoughts based on their experiences as consultants in which their clients all had the same kinds of problems: inconsistent builds, the shipping of untested code, and impossible-to-change designs.

Scott asked about the importance of the name of the book. Andy said that there was a strain of thought at the time the book was written that was dogmatic and they deliberately pushed against such approaches. Dave pointed out that this was harder on their readers because it forced them to figure out for themselves what works for them.

They got into a discussion of what kind of educational background one needs to be a successful programmer. Dave revealed that he is currently teaching classes at SMU to, he says, corrupt the youth by teaching them things like functional programming, and because traditional computer science education is poorly serving the industry and the student. People are coming out of university with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and, in terms of their value in the industry, they are not much different from people who are coming out of eight-week bootcamps. He teaches third or fourth year undergraduates and graduate students and he has found that none have been shown any form of testing. He would much rather hire someone who had the right attitude, was smart, and who could talk to people and he could show such a person how to code while on the job.

Andy added that he gets the feeling that most computer science programs are there to teach you to become a professor of computer science rather than a problem-solver. What Andy says people need to learn, and what university education is not providing, are problem-solving skills.

Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-dave-thomas/id117488860?i=1000446461596

Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-with-dave-thomas-and-andy-hunt-VBmLw9lP

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Intro/outro music: "waste time" by Vincent Augustus