

Revenge of the Nerds – Engineers Have Never Had it Better [pdf] - onedev
http://identified.typepad.com/files/revengeofthenerds2.pdf

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ChuckMcM
In my opinion, this is a pretty toxic way of evaluating yourself. Its like
saying "you can't be a top engineer if you don't graduate from the right
school" which is complete bullshit. And yet young people hear that and believe
it and waste a lot of time in the distraction of fixing their 'relative'
position. Please don't do this.

How to figure out if you are a "Top" engineer:

1) Do you enjoy the challenges you get at work?

2) Do you enjoy the folks you are working with?

3) Do you earn enough to meet your needs and still save for retirement?

4) Are you learning every day?

Congratulations, you are a "Top Engineer."

~~~
Radim
I'll be sure to tell my wife, who meets all of your points.

As a kindergarden teacher, she'll be delighted to hear she's a top engineer
:-)

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shanelja
I don't see why she isn't - since we are talking in relative terms here
anyway.

Your wife works building the minds of children, improving them, making them as
efficient as possible to help their growth, she is the modern growth hacker of
education, whatever that means.

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up_and_up
> Where are the best engineers coming from and where are they working?

This seems like a pedigree pony show.

The best engineers in my experience:

1\. Are highly productive in writing good quality code/systems etc

2\. Know when to take responsibility and lead a feature/project etc

3\. Know how to mentor well.

4\. Know how to quickly slice a complex problem into digestable/achievable
chunks.

5\. Know how to deliver software on time and on budget.

6\. May or may not have a CS degree.

7\. May or may not have attended some high pedigree school.

8\. May or may not have worked at some high pedigree corporation.

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alaskamiller
Man, you're bringing me down, man! Don't you know it's the age of the nerds!
Silicon Valley has never been hotter! 6 figure salaries, billion dollar
valuations!

Everyone's the best, only the best comes here. STEM! MIT! CAL! STANFORD! We're
changing the world, doing stuff that matters!

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slurgfest
The persistence of talk about top engineers (or 1%, A players, etc.) makes me
wonder whether there are any uses for the bottom 90-99%. Is the 89th
percentile unemployable?

Is it always really that important to have the comparatively best people
(however you define and discover that), and not just someone who can do the
required jobs well?

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dave_sullivan
Mid market is where the best value is. Give someone with promise a shot and
mentor them and you'll end up with a great employee. The guy that works at
Facebook, used to work for google, went to Stanford--might they be more likely
to jump ship as soon as there's a new game in town?

I guess it depends on what you're going for, but I don't think the "best and
brightest" mantra is all its cracked up to be. People can become better and
brighter with the right guidance--only hiring the best and brightest and
considering it an all or nothing proposition is lazy.

Edit: to be fair, as has been pointed out, there are engineers that are
literally 1000x more productive, and they don't cost 1000x as much. That rare
bird truly is best and brightest and is worth every penny. Trouble is, it's
really tough to tell, and I don't know that the traits to look for are
necessarily correlated with credentials typically attributed to "best and
brightest". That is, those people don't all work at Facebook et al

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sliverstorm
_literally 1000x more productive_

Are we saying 1000x more productive than top-5-percentile engineers, or 1000x
more productive than the worst engineers?

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shanelja
1000x more productive is too many orders of magnitude in individual
performance for me to really process, perhaps he means 1000x more productive
than 1,000 monkeys with typewriters?

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sliverstorm
I presume you can think of it as this legendary engineer does what would take
a normal engineer 3 years to do, each day.

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slurgfest
When you put it that way, it sounds absolutely ridiculous. Almost 3 years of
normal work every single day: do people really believe that??

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sliverstorm
It certainly appears they do believe that.

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confluence
Contra-indicator number #27: When things have never been better - then things
are about to get a whole lot worse.

Regression to the mean is a bitch.

Enjoy the hay while it lasts my fellow engineering brethren - winter is coming
:)

Note: I saw the last boom blow up. Let's just say that it had a negative
impression upon my forward looking optimism.

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iskander
That logic doesn't really apply world population. Or infant mortality rates.
Or anything else that increases due to a change in underlying situation rather
than random fluctuation.

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confluence
It's not logic. It's a heuristic. Furthermore world population growth is
currently stalling.

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kddd
Would you mind to share more contra-indicators?

