0:00
Another quote of yours is you talking
0:03
about 10x engineers and how much you
0:06
dislike that that trope and and
0:11
one of my favorite quotes of yours is um
0:15
if you self-define as a 10x engineer
0:17
then you're an [ __ ]
0:20
[laughter]
0:21
I think we can I think most of us can
0:23
probably agree with that. I like that.
0:26
>> Yeah. Yeah. every every every every
0:29
person I've ever met who was obsessed
0:31
with being a 10x engineer, they they
0:33
were just like not conscious of the tech
0:35
debt that they were sloughing off onto
0:37
everyone else in their pursuit to be the
0:39
best.
0:40
>> Yeah. Yeah.
0:40
>> No. Yeah.
0:42
>> I I I've met some people that I think
0:44
probably qualified as 10x engineers.
0:46
>> I have too. And I think I think the I
0:49
think the thing probably exists, but I
0:51
think it's a dumb target. It's a dumb
0:54
target to aim for. I would agree with
0:57
you that if you if it's the way that you
0:58
think about yourself, think harder about
1:01
yourself.
1:02
>> Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] No, I I have met
1:05
some I I've been in Silicon Valley my
1:08
entire career and I have worked with
1:09
some folks who are truly like
1:13
just prolific and they're they've been
1:16
thinking about it constantly for 30
1:17
years, you know, and they are I will
1:19
never be anywhere near that good at at
1:21
that. But but it is an archetype, right?
1:24
Some of those engineers, they actually
1:26
function, they're like principal level,
1:28
but they kind of function more like
1:30
>> five senior engineers duct taped
1:32
together. You know, you know what I
1:33
mean? And then there are some who are
1:35
the same level who are not nearly as
1:36
prolific. But like at Facebook, I
1:39
remember there was a level seven
1:41
engineer who wrote like five lines of
1:44
code one one quarter. Uh but one of them
1:46
saved the company $50 million, you know?
1:48
So like there's room for lots of
1:52
different definitions of excellence
1:55
depending on what is needed by the team.
2:00
>> Yeah. So I've got another another
2:03
another quote of yours. Sorry, this is
2:06
just me quoting you to yourself.
2:08
>> I think it would be more fun for the
2:09
audience if we really disagreed on
2:11
something.
2:12
>> Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how we find
2:14
that. But writing code writing code is
2:16
not the hard part. It never has been.
2:18
The hard part of software is
2:19
understanding it, maintaining it,
2:21
extending it, scaling it, operating it,
2:24
migrating it, refactoring it, crafting
2:26
the right level of abstractions,
2:27
instrumenting it, and reasoning about
2:29
it.
2:31
It's it's the hard part. It's
2:33
>> that that's what I think I I in one of
2:37
my books, I tried to reclaim the term
2:39
software engineering because I think
2:41
it's got devalued.
2:43
>> Yeah. I I I think it's got to mean I
2:46
either I think in America in particular
2:49
it tends to just be a synonym for
2:51
writing code and that's not engineering
2:54
that's different I think.
2:55
>> Sure.
2:56
>> Um and in other places certainly in
2:59
parts of the UK it becomes a synonym for
3:02
a bureaucratic approach to writing code
3:04
and I don't think that's right either.
3:06
My view is that engineering as a
3:08
discipline broadly, not just in
3:10
software, is probably the height of
3:13
human creativity.
3:15
It's doing problems that nobody knows,
3:19
solving problems that nobody knows how
3:20
to solve and doing that in a way that's
3:23
practical, functional, and working to an
3:25
economic target. It's, you know, it's
3:28
>> it's it's a difficult difficult thing to
3:30
do. And it takes all of this stuff and
3:32
more. And it's about this, you know,
3:35
optimizing and tuning, learning and
3:39
control to be able to do these things.
3:41
And if it's, you know, if whatever it is
3:44
that we're doing
3:46
doesn't steer us in in in the direction
3:48
of success, what we're doing isn't
3:50
engineering, cuz engineering is by
3:52
definition is what works best. What we
3:54
know at this moment what works best.
3:56
This clip was taken from my podcast, The
3:59
Engineering Room with Dave Farley, a
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4:02
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[music]