Do Good Programmers Need Agents?

braindrainbahrain writes: A rock star needs an agent, so maybe a rock star programmer needs one, too. As described in The New Yorker, a talent agency called 10x, which got started in the music business, is not your typical head hunter/recruiter agency. "The company's name comes from the idea, well established in the tech world, that the very best programmers are superstars, capable of achieving ten times the productivity of their merely competent colleagues." The writer talks with a number of programmers using agents to find work, who generally seem pleased with it, though the article has viewpoints from skeptics as well.

Comments

10x Productivity

[lgw]

The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.

I'm not valued because I can bang out more code than the next guy - I'm valued because I can lead a team of people and make them more productive: through design review, best practices, experience doing agile right, and so on. Sure, all those things make me more productive to, but it's much more valuable as a force multiplier for a large team.

That's what the job is, as a senior dev. That and doing all the horrible wrangling with project management systems, clarifying user requirements coming from PMs and translating them into sanity, and so on. The more senior I become, the less time I spend coding, because there's only so much value I add working by myself.

Re:10x Productivity

[phantomfive]

The "10x productivity" idea is somewhat silly anyhow - sure, some people are quite productive, but mostly if one guy is 10x another, the other guy just sucks.

Plenty of studies have shown that it's true. If you can't see it, maybe you're one of the less productive ones?

The more senior I become, the less time I spend coding, because there's only so much value I add working by myself.

Heading into management, eh? Definitely sounds like you're one of the less productive ones.

Re:10x Productivity

[lgw]

I suspect you're a self-proclaimed "rock star" who's convinced he's God's gift to programming, but hasn't worked on a team of equally-smart people, or who doesn't understand the reality of large projects.

Ability to bang out lots of code is the right way to measure a junior developer, but is not the essence of productivity. Two guys drive from NYC to LA - one at 10 MPH, one at 100 MPH. Who get there first? Well, it's important to know which one is headed in the right direction, and which one drives into the ocean, and is either of them so careless they're unlikely to make it there alive in the first place.

If your job skill is "given a clear design with unambiguous requirements and success criteria, I can bang out that code very fast," well, that's great for a junior dev. If you write well-tested, debugable, supportable, maintainable, secure, scalable code given ambiguous requirements, great, that's a successful mid-career dev. If you can fix everything wrong process-wise with your 100-dev organization so that everyone can work twice as fast, well, you're 10x as productive as the guy who sits in a corner and bangs out 10x the code, aren't you? If you can invent a product that solves a problem that everyone has, but no one else thought there was a solution to, well, the guy banging out code isn't even on the same scale.

Re:10x Productivity

[Pulzar]

I hate managing with "rockstar" developers because they're always too arrogant and full of themselves. They detract from the team, argue and refuse to listen to others.

Those aren't rock-star developers. As another poster said, you likely have never worked with a rock-star developer. They are great at what they do, *and* they make the team better. They are rare, but it's awesome when you see somebody that inspires others around them by what they can do.

They help the junior devs and often their time is better spent doing this than banging out code even though their code is a lot better than the juniors. Someone who can manage a team is valued for more than just their coding skills, if they've got people skills they are definitely a force multiplier.

You sound like you work in a big company, on big teams. This is certainly true there, and in order to have a large team productive, you need a lot of good people keeping those juniors productive.

Several times, though, I've seen those similar good people bang out their much superior code and finish the project in the same amount of time, while have a team that's 6 or 7 times smaller, with no juniors.

Re:10x Productivity

[lgw]

Have you ever worked for a big software company? That's not the job of management at all. It's the essence of engineering: improving the performance of a complex system (a system of made of programmers), or alternatively, to invent the stuff that really matters. That's why the tech track exists, and that's how you get paid the same as those senior managers.

The whole point is: your productivity as a coder is just nice, but there are more important skills for senior developers to focus on: skills that scale with team size.

Re:somewhat diffrent

[narcc]

Now imagine if programmers were overpaid, undertalented, super inflated egos, where glaring faults in code could be patched over with a public relations campaign?

Imagine?