3grdlurker

So a fast programmer is necessarily better than one who takes a little more time but pushes out stabler code?

So you’re gonna go around the office to point fingers and tell on people that they’re not 10xers, and then call them too sensitive if they react? You’re talking in abstracts but if you put what you said in context (ie this discussion) it doesn’t make sense.

I mean, if all you’re saying is that “better programmers deserve better pay”, then you’re not exactly saying anything groundbreaking and the concept of “10xer” is not going to be necessary to make that point. It should also be noted that the salary that you get isn’t just a product of your talent but also of how well you sell yourself. Amongst many other factors, of course.

Of course it is subjective. This is literally what you said:

> That is my definition.

You obviously care about optimizing for salary expenses. Most companies have room to hire more people who can do a few things well, so their definition of 10x would be different because they’ll have different expectations of their employees.

And really, if your definition of a 10xer is some poor fool who’s willing to take the job of 10 people for a single person’s salary, good luck finding someone who wants to spend their lives living that way.

But then you have to ask what metrics are being used to define a 10x engineer. You’ll see that everyone has a different version of that and therefore whether a 10x engineer exists solely depends on the ontological argument for a 10x engineer. By the end of the day 10x is subjective because teams have different needs.

I mean, I get your point about the government but now you’re just complaining about how being insensitive to other people has the consequence of them fighting back.

It’s incredibly reductionist to think that productivity is inherent to an individual when the world is never that simple and there are always a lot of factors involved in any outcome. Even the people that you think are “10xers” will stumble under the right circumstances, and the converse is also true about the people you think are incompetent.

It’s not so much that we built a culture that disallows these things to be said—I’m sure you have the freedom to say that to people if you’re prepared for the consequences. It’s just that it’s such a hasty, unnuanced thing to say, and business decisions should not be made on the basis of rash remarks that aren’t very well thought-out.

Yeah so the problem with that response is that you can say the exact same thing about Facebook, so it now doesn’t make sense that that’s being made as a point in favor of Google.

Have you actually weighed the value that you're getting out of Google services versus the privacy that you (and people) are trading off? Because I feel that people are blindly saying that and are overestimating the value. Let's see:

* Google Maps - great navigation and place accuracy, in exchange for your real-time geolocation and social media posts tagging places

* YouTube - free video hosting in exchange for your data being fed to ML algorithms, which make them billions; also now a great source of disinformation

* Google Photos - free image hosting also in exchange of your enabling of their billion-dollar ML-based businesses

I think I'm making the point in the above examples that they're making more money than what we're turning over, but please feel free to tell me--what other great value do we derive from Google products do we derive from our data?

Not a US citizen, but what’s noticeably lacking in discussions about surveillance (such as this one) is faulting the very government that’s pressuring companies to comply with state surveillance programs. Doesn’t matter how big you are or how much you’re worth—if your interests do not align with the state you’re not above its power.