I’ve found that most companies don’t want an elite engineer. They want “best for the bucks” engineers who’re often mediocre.
If by accident, they do end up with an elite engineer, the company most likely doesn’t know what to do with them. Everyone gets beaten down to the same level of mediocrity, suffering the indifference of managers who don’t even know they’ve got an elite engineer. And, oftentimes, the incentives are aligned in the opposite direction.
But what they really want is someone who can ship the worst possible muck as fast as inhumanly possible, and still manage to help keep the lawsuits down to a dull roar of just multiple billions of dollars per year. And they want to pay these developers literally zero.
Which is why they all thought that tokenmaxxing would be such a good thing, since it could be used to build virtual engineers that literally cost them absolutely no money at all.
Yes, I worked at Amazon. I know that culture. And they had some seriously elite engineers, at least when I started there.
I also did a six-month stint at Apple Retail Software Engineering a few years earlier. They also had some seriously elite engineers there. Honest-to-goodness real-deal 10x types. And they frequently got yanked from one project to another based on whatever the whim was of Steve Jobs, or whomever was in charge. And they were constantly being pushed to actually produce 100x, not just 10x.
Well, a lot of times companies, the people hiring, do really want to hire elite engineers.
But the problem is that they don't know how to recognize those types of professionals and don't even realize they don't know it.
And the problem can compound.
Companies think someone is an elite engineer because they come from a place "famous" for hiring elite professionals but that, in fact, is one of those that has no idea what an elite engineer is.
Perhaps, this is a hard problem. Or hard enough at least, if I'm being charitable and trying to excuse bad hiring practices.
At the scale large enterprises operate this is quite rational. It's simply not feasible to recruit and retain enough elite engineers to meet their goals. So they have to design org structures and processes to extract useful work from mediocre engineers.
An “elite engineer” is only worth their cost when they are given agency and allowed to chose what to work on.
Most executives(as in the executives at the majority of companies with valuations below big tech) would rather kill themselves than let an employee have any agency.
How does this divide out by organization? Is there a few organizations that are responsible for 50% of the output of that market? I'm skeptical of so broadly applying a rule that comes from studying the authors of scientific papers.
> The other 27 million people aren't doing nothing. They're the ones who take what the 5,000 build and turn it into products
This is just the software industry's fault. More engineers could be elite, maybe not in their first 10 years of their career, but what companies do is cut that short and push engineers away from the technical work, even after a few years. My guess is that the elite engineers had the opportunity to invest in their technical knowledge from childhood.
> maybe not in their first 10 years of their career, but what companies do is cut that short and push engineers away from the technical work
Perhaps the issue is that there just isn't that much technical work to go around.
While software was booming I remember hearing stories from EEs who found the opportunities in that field lacking. My understanding is that a lot of the people didn't do much technical or engineering work, but those who remained in the field became "BOM spreadsheet babysitters" and "Guy who's only here because we need a licensed engineer to sign off". It really pushed my away from that field even those there are many domains within it that greatly interest me. My understanding is that a lot of the hands on or technical engineering positions went to Asia along with the manufacturing
Yeah that could be the case. In my experience companies slice their software products in tiny slices and give a tiny slice to engineers, which is technically easy. Then after a few years there is real pressure to move away from doing hands-on technical work and just manage your own team of engineers with their tiny slices.
Instead of doing that, companies could structure to have less engineers with more technical work, and letting them specialize over many years. But part of the incentive is not wanting any one engineer to have too much knowledge in efforts to make them replaceable. It's an unfortunate side effect of how companies optimize things, and the consumer has no way to know or select this at the market level.
I think you're right that many more people are in theory capable of joining the group, but not that the industry is conspiring to keep it small. If anything it's the people who have an academic history that stretches back to childhood that end up dependent on having someone to guide and grade them. Beating your own path through the wild is scary, uncertain, and often thankless, so I think you'd only want to do it if you already felt sure you were among the most motivated and dedicated members of a group.
Well, the industry is rewarding people who had the privilege to invest their childhood into one singular focus. By the time they graduate they are way above everyone else and so they can both do management and leadership while still having elite level technical skills. Most people start working on their skills in university, so I think we would see more elite engineers if companies just let them specialize over a long time, and structure the companies to allow this. Instead companies structure companies to replace engineers easily, and so the person with pre-existing technical knowledge has a huge advantage.
I don't think it's necessarily a privilege to have a childhood with a singular focus. Again, having your whole destiny picked for you leads to a kind of person who often does not lead themselves with any confidence. The trappings of success will be on them before they've ever faced a test from the engineering school of hard knocks. They'll try to lead right away (because they'll be sure they were picked to lead) but the smarter move would be to try following for a while.
I think the test is right: how long can you hold onto a single project so that you specialize more and more deeply? Every startup is an attempt to do exactly this, and most startups still fail.
By that same reasoning, there are more elite physicists, chemists, and biologists in total than there are elite scientists. Maybe that's even true due to some statistical mechanism. But if you are looking for a good physicist, you are probably not interested in hiring a top biologist.
The same should be true at every level of specialization. The more specific your needs are, the more likely one of the candidates is about as good as anyone in that specialty.
How could a single person of even a team of a hundred possibly investigate, understand the goals and realities of a single country let alone the world ?
This is just plain dumb to make or present a statement like this.
Another possibility:
Elite software developers are never unemployed and will rarely or never surface in a resume pile. Mediocre to bad developers will be looking for new jobs fairly often.
In other news, people believe the market is fair and the best people get paid the most.
We all know that people in Africa work much much harder than your average western person, and yet they get dollars a day while you and me get 100x more.
Life isnt fair and to think that the best always win is plainly wrong, because we both know those poor people in Africa deserve far more than they get.
this is for part of it. I have been SWE for almost 30 years now and do not have a resume. I interviewed for a ton of positions when I graduated from Uni, got my first job and subsequently never looked for a job again.
I think more of an issue here is that there is just way too many SWEs and we can’t all be “elite.” In my 30 years in I have worked with roughly same percentage of “elite” as the post is alluding to. The history/structure of just about every project I worked on boils down to needing two distinct group of SWEs, the inovators and closers. The inovators are the “elite” (within the project) and they figure all the shit out. The closers crank it out once all the shit is figured out for them
Most of the true elite have spent years working anonymously with no publicity. All of their work is locked up behind an enterprise firewall. They never post on social media or contribute to open source or speak at conferences.
I’ve found that most companies don’t want an elite engineer. They want “best for the bucks” engineers who’re often mediocre.
If by accident, they do end up with an elite engineer, the company most likely doesn’t know what to do with them. Everyone gets beaten down to the same level of mediocrity, suffering the indifference of managers who don’t even know they’ve got an elite engineer. And, oftentimes, the incentives are aligned in the opposite direction.
I disagree, somewhat.
Many SAY they want elite engineers.
But what they really want is someone who can ship the worst possible muck as fast as inhumanly possible, and still manage to help keep the lawsuits down to a dull roar of just multiple billions of dollars per year. And they want to pay these developers literally zero.
Which is why they all thought that tokenmaxxing would be such a good thing, since it could be used to build virtual engineers that literally cost them absolutely no money at all.
Yes, I worked at Amazon. I know that culture. And they had some seriously elite engineers, at least when I started there.
I also did a six-month stint at Apple Retail Software Engineering a few years earlier. They also had some seriously elite engineers there. Honest-to-goodness real-deal 10x types. And they frequently got yanked from one project to another based on whatever the whim was of Steve Jobs, or whomever was in charge. And they were constantly being pushed to actually produce 100x, not just 10x.
Well, a lot of times companies, the people hiring, do really want to hire elite engineers.
But the problem is that they don't know how to recognize those types of professionals and don't even realize they don't know it.
And the problem can compound.
Companies think someone is an elite engineer because they come from a place "famous" for hiring elite professionals but that, in fact, is one of those that has no idea what an elite engineer is.
Perhaps, this is a hard problem. Or hard enough at least, if I'm being charitable and trying to excuse bad hiring practices.
Very little that software engineers do has an impact on lawsuit outcomes either way.
At the scale large enterprises operate this is quite rational. It's simply not feasible to recruit and retain enough elite engineers to meet their goals. So they have to design org structures and processes to extract useful work from mediocre engineers.
An “elite engineer” is only worth their cost when they are given agency and allowed to chose what to work on.
Most executives(as in the executives at the majority of companies with valuations below big tech) would rather kill themselves than let an employee have any agency.
https://www.pangram.com/history/cf411aa5-6872-4d7d-9475-8b0c...
Don't waste your time.
Seeing lots of content on the web about pangram's unreliability
run it through pangram to see if it's AI generated. Try their v4 model it's really good.
Is there anything this dude writes that isn't AI generated. I guess you'll have to go back to his 2021 and before blogs.
How does this divide out by organization? Is there a few organizations that are responsible for 50% of the output of that market? I'm skeptical of so broadly applying a rule that comes from studying the authors of scientific papers.
> The other 27 million people aren't doing nothing. They're the ones who take what the 5,000 build and turn it into products
This is just the software industry's fault. More engineers could be elite, maybe not in their first 10 years of their career, but what companies do is cut that short and push engineers away from the technical work, even after a few years. My guess is that the elite engineers had the opportunity to invest in their technical knowledge from childhood.
> maybe not in their first 10 years of their career, but what companies do is cut that short and push engineers away from the technical work
Perhaps the issue is that there just isn't that much technical work to go around.
While software was booming I remember hearing stories from EEs who found the opportunities in that field lacking. My understanding is that a lot of the people didn't do much technical or engineering work, but those who remained in the field became "BOM spreadsheet babysitters" and "Guy who's only here because we need a licensed engineer to sign off". It really pushed my away from that field even those there are many domains within it that greatly interest me. My understanding is that a lot of the hands on or technical engineering positions went to Asia along with the manufacturing
Yeah that could be the case. In my experience companies slice their software products in tiny slices and give a tiny slice to engineers, which is technically easy. Then after a few years there is real pressure to move away from doing hands-on technical work and just manage your own team of engineers with their tiny slices.
Instead of doing that, companies could structure to have less engineers with more technical work, and letting them specialize over many years. But part of the incentive is not wanting any one engineer to have too much knowledge in efforts to make them replaceable. It's an unfortunate side effect of how companies optimize things, and the consumer has no way to know or select this at the market level.
...and by the way AI isn't any of the 5000!
I think you're right that many more people are in theory capable of joining the group, but not that the industry is conspiring to keep it small. If anything it's the people who have an academic history that stretches back to childhood that end up dependent on having someone to guide and grade them. Beating your own path through the wild is scary, uncertain, and often thankless, so I think you'd only want to do it if you already felt sure you were among the most motivated and dedicated members of a group.
Well, the industry is rewarding people who had the privilege to invest their childhood into one singular focus. By the time they graduate they are way above everyone else and so they can both do management and leadership while still having elite level technical skills. Most people start working on their skills in university, so I think we would see more elite engineers if companies just let them specialize over a long time, and structure the companies to allow this. Instead companies structure companies to replace engineers easily, and so the person with pre-existing technical knowledge has a huge advantage.
I don't think it's necessarily a privilege to have a childhood with a singular focus. Again, having your whole destiny picked for you leads to a kind of person who often does not lead themselves with any confidence. The trappings of success will be on them before they've ever faced a test from the engineering school of hard knocks. They'll try to lead right away (because they'll be sure they were picked to lead) but the smarter move would be to try following for a while.
I think the test is right: how long can you hold onto a single project so that you specialize more and more deeply? Every startup is an attempt to do exactly this, and most startups still fail.
By that same reasoning, there are more elite physicists, chemists, and biologists in total than there are elite scientists. Maybe that's even true due to some statistical mechanism. But if you are looking for a good physicist, you are probably not interested in hiring a top biologist.
The same should be true at every level of specialization. The more specific your needs are, the more likely one of the candidates is about as good as anyone in that specialty.
I mean you could just as easily claim there are only 5000 “elite” software roles available at any given time.
> There are only 5,000 elite software engineers in the world
And at least 50,000 software developers are absolutely convinced they are one of the 5,000.
How could a single person of even a team of a hundred possibly investigate, understand the goals and realities of a single country let alone the world ?
This is just plain dumb to make or present a statement like this.
Yesterday there were 5000. Today its 100. Tomorrow it will be 10000.
Another possibility: Elite software developers are never unemployed and will rarely or never surface in a resume pile. Mediocre to bad developers will be looking for new jobs fairly often.
In other news, people believe the market is fair and the best people get paid the most.
We all know that people in Africa work much much harder than your average western person, and yet they get dollars a day while you and me get 100x more.
Life isnt fair and to think that the best always win is plainly wrong, because we both know those poor people in Africa deserve far more than they get.
this is for part of it. I have been SWE for almost 30 years now and do not have a resume. I interviewed for a ton of positions when I graduated from Uni, got my first job and subsequently never looked for a job again.
I think more of an issue here is that there is just way too many SWEs and we can’t all be “elite.” In my 30 years in I have worked with roughly same percentage of “elite” as the post is alluding to. The history/structure of just about every project I worked on boils down to needing two distinct group of SWEs, the inovators and closers. The inovators are the “elite” (within the project) and they figure all the shit out. The closers crank it out once all the shit is figured out for them
Did you switch jobs within that time or stay where you were forever?
- jon skeet is one of em
L take.
lets name them all, ill start. fabrice bellard
Most of the true elite have spent years working anonymously with no publicity. All of their work is locked up behind an enterprise firewall. They never post on social media or contribute to open source or speak at conferences.
That's the list.
Bisqwit is there too