Obviously the specifics are going to depend on exactly how a team pegs story points, but if an average engineer delivers 10 story points during a two week sprint, then that would mean that a 1000x engineer would deliver 10000 story points, correct? I don't see how someone can actually believe that.
These companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to train these models and (hope to) make billions from them. The researchers are the people who know how to do it. These aren't guys cranking out React buttons.
They know how to train the models because they were part of a team that did it once at a competitor already. They bring with them very domain specific knowledge and experience. It's not something you can learn at college or hacking away in your spare time.
Fair enough, they're probably worth the money it takes to poach them. But trying to stretch the (arguably already tenous) "10x engineer" model to explain why is just ridiculous.
suppose every team needs to do a similar 10 story points of maintenance, like a java major version update from 5 to 21.
if youve got 100 teams, thats about 1000 story points, and if an engineer automated that change, theyve still done 1000 story points overall, even if what they implemented was only 10 story points itself
Yeah, story points approximate effort, so it's fairly impossible to be 10x on those.
JIRA has a notion of business value points, and you could make up similar metrics in other project planning tools. The problem would then be how to estimate the value of implementing 0.01% of the technology of a product that doesn't sell as a standalone feature. If you can accurately do that, you might be the 100x employee already.
I agree, but my point is that 1000x is clearly hyperbole. Certainly there are people who are more productive or impactful, but not 1000 times more. That's particularly true since programming (like most human endeavors) is largely a team sport.
1000x revenue not 1000x developer productivity is possible sometimes. There are lots of jobs where developers also decide on the roadmap and requirements along with the execution instead of just being ticket monkey and a good idea executed well could easily be worth 1000x changing button colours and adding pagination to an API
From my personal account, I started with PHP and Perl (high school and college) and then graduated to Ruby on Rails (early dev career) and now its Python and JS.
I would say Ruby on Rails was a 10x on raw PHP in terms of feature specs per hour and AI is a 10x on Ruby on Rails (and its derivatives).
We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
> We're probably 100x the developer productivity on a per developer basis from the early days of Web 2.0 with PHP, just a personal anecdote though.
Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
> Only if you compare create a website in PHP 20 years ago vs using wordpress. But to create a project like wordpress from zero now is as difficult as it was 20 years ago.
Roll to disbelieve on this one. There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy. I'm not even talking React/Next or whatever - this was before RoR, before Django (or at least very early versions of both).
I think it's pretty impossible to look around and not notice that technical advances have improved a lot of things in the world - why does it sound credible that programming itself hasn't improved at all in twenty years? Even look at languages like C++ today compared to 20 years ago, they're massively different - do you think all those changes to the languages are neutral or negative in terms of productivity?
Quality does not change as fast :)) Actually, most of the times, when things go faster, the quality drops as fast.
> There's no way that creating something like WordPress 20 years ago, before any modern-day web application frameworks, was anywhere near as easy
Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community. This 90% part can't be automated by AI or fast-tracked using RoR, Django or whatever. So much that none of the hundreds of wordpress alternatives created in the past 2 decades got any closer to replace it.
> Wordpress was 10% about coding and 90% about community.
I completely agree. I just didn't think we were talking about that aspect, just how long it takes to actually build the code of WordPress.
You might be saying that making the technical-building aspects of most technical products go faster won't necessarily have as big an impact as many programmers believe. Programming isn't the core of most products to the degree most programmers think, and instead the core of most products/companies is more about product thinking, sales & marketing, etc. I agree with this sentiment a lot.
That aside, I think there's no question it's faster to program in Python or C++ right now, than it was 20 years ago. Things really have improved on the programming language front (and related libraries, and other advances).
Not everyone has to be rich to want/need privacy. Maybe you had threats against your life and dont want your house and vehicle to be traceable to your name. Maybe you disagree with the automated license plate reader/tracker and this is one of the only legal ways around that.
Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it