
Reed Hastings: On rock star developers - jonathanzufi
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/08/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-on-high-salaries-the-best-are-easily-10x-better-than-average.html
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bitwize
Many of the developers I admire most, if they be rock stars at all, are rock
stars in the Neil Peart mold: they're unassuming and don't take center stage,
but are widely regarded as geniuses and masters of the craft, setting the
vision and structure of the project. Good examples include John Carmack (who
was perfectly willing to let Romero engage in rockstar theatrics while he
hacked out the next Id engine) and Dan Ingalls (Alan Kay gets most of the
glory for Smalltalk, but even he would say Ingalls did the lion's share of
implementing the thing).

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vbsteven
I like to call myself a roadie developer, swooping in to clean up the mess
after the rockstar developer came in and trashed the stage...

~~~
bitwize
I tell people I strive to be a "session musician". I'm there to use my skill
in the craft to do a job and contribute to a greater whole.

~~~
nunez
Session musicians are also called “consultants”

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sushid
Everyone seems to be trashing the idea of 10x developers (and I would tend to
agree unless you’re literally talking about a 1 in a million mythical dev) but
there are definitely 2x or 3x developers I have worked with at companies.

Unfortunately, I can’t imagine a team full of just these developers (in my
personal experience) as these folks tend to be bossier than the rest and/or
have true disdain for non-programming work which I can empathize with, but is
essential in team settings.

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OldHand2018
Netflix is famous for paying top salaries, but do they actually pay 10x the
average salary? Is the rockstar getting a raw deal at Netflix?

~~~
maerF0x0
If it's the best offer is it a raw deal?

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chuckgreenman
Rockstar developers can duct tape a bunch of bullshit together and make a good
demo, and after 6 months when they get poached by another company you'll just
have to hire actually competent people. They'll have to untangle the your
geniuses opus of bullshit and rebuild it into something that works. It will
take time and it will be expensive.

I'm not too bothered by people wanting to hire rockstars though because there
will always be a market for people like me to come in and clean up the mess.

~~~
moralestapia
This is true, but then also, sometimes that's exactly what you need.

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carterklein13
It's interesting NBC is still covering something like this. I feel like this
is generally well-known in the industry, and that any lean company will try to
hire a "rockstar" whenever they can, as they don't have the budget to waste on
a pretty good engineer (although, I know in recent years myself and many
others personally despise that term "rockstar" and think it causes more harm
than good).

~~~
zimpenfish
"Rockstar developers come in, do 90 minutes of work, trash the place, then
leave the clearing up to everyone else whilst they bugger off to their next
gig."

~~~
carterklein13
That's a good quote, and very similar to some experiences I've had (who said
this?). On the other side of the coin... I've also seen people hired as
"rockstar developers" become the overworked scapegoat of a team...

~~~
zimpenfish
> (who said this?)

It's what always pops into my mind when people talk about rockstar developers
- don't think I got it from somewhere else but you never know these days.

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RedBeetDeadpool
I don't know what the term "rock star developers" actually mean, but there are
definitely people I would call short term and long term developers.

The progress of a short term developers work, looks extremely fast, but its
logarithmic. A lot of bad project managers think he does an insane amount,
maybe 10x, maybe 100x levels of work. He writes code so fast and cranks out so
many features its no wonder he's a rockstar. After a while though, because
everything he builds is built for the moment, its just nothing but mazes full
of bugs that frighten even the nerdiest dungeon crawling hacker.

The progress of having a long term developer on a team, on the other hand,
starts off slow, but it's exponential. He might need weeks or months to build
up a good foundation. He spends time writing small things that show little to
no benefit, but are built well and from which other things can be built on top
of. Everything he builds can be used by anyone who reads it, so they too can
use his work. His work multiplies the work of his own as well as the rest of
the team. But the bad project manager sees him and thinks he's too slow to
complete tickets. He is a .05x developer at this point because the average
developer would have been finished with two features by now.

After weeks, maybe months, however, his progress matches those of the average
developer. In time progress is so quick, it makes the short term developer's
work, which is starting to plateau, look effectively flat. While the short
term developer was spending his time building up walls with his hammer, nails,
and duct tape, the long term developer was there making a drill, that was used
in making a saw, that was used in making a ladder, that was used in making a
crane. Now he's making skyscrapers using the tools he built, something the
short term will never even be able to do in a single lifetime.

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mindhash
The test can not be conclusive unless all of them worked on same type of
projects, programming languages and faced same bugs over the years.

It's quite likely the so called rockstar had a prior experience in the problem
at hand. It will be good to see the engineers learn an entirely new language
and solve an entirely unrelated problem

The thing to draw out from the study is hire the right fit. There is nothing
called rock star engineer. You rockstar engineer is the best fit for your job,
tech stack and challenges in your business.

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greendude29
This article makes the dumbest assertions I've heard about quality software
development in quite a while.

The "study" isn't really a study. Even so, the metrics that it claims to
derive aren't there for the picking.

Then throwing in big names like Bill Gates to say "look Bill Gates said it
too" is just name dropping.

Also this looks like something someone would write in 3 minutes between
meetings and never actually proof read. The quality of the writing is really
quite low.

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emerged
It's possible to be a rockstar developer without being a diva. Some devs are
just genuinely skilled at the tech and also at being good coworkers.

~~~
bluejellybean
This is how I've heard some people describe the difference between a 10x and
100x dev.

~~~
ludocode
Indeed. The comments on this article are surprisingly negative. It seems most
developers, even on HN, believe you can only pretend to achieve 10X by cutting
corners and leaving your coworkers with the mess.

My experience has been the opposite. The most productive developers I've
worked with have also been extremely skilled at communication and
documentation, and they tend to produce much more maintainable code than the
average.

~~~
anthony_d
I agree there can be a huge difference in skill between developers, my
complaint with the 10x moniker is that it rarely corresponds with those who
are actually skilled.

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pluto9
> The researchers expected that the best programmer would outperform his
> average counterpart by a factor of two or three. But it turned out that the
> most skilled programmer far outperformed the worst. He was 20 times faster
> at coding, 25 times faster at debugging, and 10 times faster at program
> execution than the programmer with the lowest marks.

What? Okay, so how much did he outperform the _average_ one?

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echlebek
I had to laugh at their test. Two hours? Many people can sustain a high pace
of work for two hours. But how about as time wears on? There's a lot of
assumptions going on here.

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ffggvv
stepping back, im wondering what would motivate the CEO of netflix to write on
article like this on CNBC?

Anyone have any ideas? It's essentially a blog post.

~~~
Tarsul
He's doing a PR tour for his new book ("no rules rules"), which is released
today... already had an interview in the guardian today:
[https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2020/sep/08/a-new-k...](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2020/sep/08/a-new-kind-of-safe-drug-netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-on-what-
could-replace-the-streaming-giant)

