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@vaurora@mstdn.socialLove this article on creating good conditions for software engineers to do their best work instead of worshipping 10x engineers. After a few jobs, you start to notice that the same person can be wildly productive in one job, 1/10 as productive in the next job, and bounce back in the following job... I've also noticed that "10x engineers" tend to be surrounded by "unproductive" engineers who are being sabotaged, plagiarized, or forced to clean up by the "10x engineer"
@vaurora @mipsytipsy is a great communicator
@vaurora I suspect this 10x engineer myth is mostly rooted in manager and non-tech people thinking of it as some kind of magic, and not the team effort that good tech usually is ...
hell yes 
@glyph @vaurora @mipsytipsy a couple times a year, I dust off "How to be a Star Engineer", which hasn't aged a day in 25 years
@SnoopJ @vaurora @mipsytipsy "Perplexingly, after two years, our data showed no appreciable cognitive, personal or psychological, social, or work or organizational
differences between stars and non-stars" who is 'perplexed', kimosabe
@glyph @vaurora @mipsytipsy anybody who's just realizing for the first time that it's all smoke and mirrors! which was where the author (and I'm sure many in the IEEE reading audience) was at the time
@SnoopJ @vaurora @mipsytipsy I know, I know :). I'm sure I internalized the original framing here in my 20s too. But I do find it interesting that even quantitative researchers, who should be showing up to these questions with relatively open minds, have already fully internalized pop-cultural assumptions about ability and performance to the point where the very first round of data that fails to validate a myth is notably confusing to them. And had already done this 25 years ago.
@SnoopJ @vaurora I still vastly prefer @mipsytipsy 's framing to what's going on in this paper because while I think there are excellent lessons here, this sort of just-so story about "how do we identify 'stars'" is still accepting this Nietzschean ubermensch framing that a "star" is a thing that it is both possible and desirable to become. Read this with a different cultural lens and the subject easily translates to "How can I make my main character syndrome worse?"
@glyph @vaurora @mipsytipsy hear hear!
@vaurora I’m a big believer in the -10x engineer.
My spouse had to work with a guy who thought he was a 10x engineer once.
Some time after the guy left the company, boss called and said to search for the guys name.
He was in the news for having been arrested for murder.
@vaurora - reminds me of the line “measuring performance is complex in a mathematical sense, by which we mean part real and part imaginary.”