Congress has abdicated its responsibility to serve the public interest by openly declaring that it will oppose any initiative by the President just for spite.
Open declaration? Surely you have a link to the speech about "just for spite"? You're not just making that up, right?
Even so, the congress has that power under the Constitution. The Congress is in charge of America, per the Constitution. The President, as leader of the executive has the job of executing the laws created by Congress, you know, the legislative branch, the lawmakers.
It's no wonder that he's forced to seek alternative solutions to get anything done.
It's his job to "get done" those laws that the Congress passes. Simply choosing not to enforce those laws because he doesn't like them is rather the opposite of his job. As the leader of the Democratic party, OTOH, he had a different path for many years to "get stuff done", a constitutional one! The American voters deliberately took that power away in the recent election, if you believe that democracy is important.
Which is all good in theory... until the parliament/congress becomes more interesting with infighting and navel gazing than actually improving the country.
If there's no strong consensus as to the best way to improve the country, better to do nothing that try something that "seemed good at the time". But in any case inaction is better than ignoring the Constitution.
And if it takes an unconstitutional tyrant to get us back on the proper track, so be it
Has there ever, ever been an unconstitutional tyrant who seized control for the betterment of the governed? I can think of a couple of cases where someone seized power militarily, then went on to create a constitution and parliament, rare as that is, but "El Presidente for Life"? Not so much.
I'm sure you'll have no regrets if a hyper-religious-conservative ends up with tyrannical control? Because you really think the problem is democracy, rather than getting your way, right?
Method matters. Obama's actions are appaling and well on the way to destroying the country for reason that have nothing to do with immigration. Immigration is a distraction at this point.
It's the constitutional issues that matter - it's been 800 years of wars to establish in Western culture that parliaments, not kings, are ultimately in charge. Ignoring the will of Congress and just making proclamations is a serious structural problem. Now we'll see if congress will do anything about this, or simply give up their position as a co-equal branch of government.
The House has the power to stop anything the government does, but they would have to actually take a stand for once. I'm not holding my breath for that: the idea that a majority of congresscritters would actually care more about governing than fundraising --- well, it's hard to take seriously.
Can you point out some of the special treatment that feminists are asking for, with a citation of them asking for it? I think you are making this shit up because every mainstream feminist I have read or listened to is just interested in equality.
Oh, you've missed the calls to fix the income inequality gap by just taxing men an extra 25% and giving it to women? You've missed the continuous refrain of every SJW ever that what offends women is all-important, but what offends just men is irrelevant? You've missed the suggestion that the best plan is to just kill 95% of men and jail the rest on an island somewhere so they can't cause any harm to real people? I see that kind of shit all the time.
But this says it all, really. (That's Jessica Valenti, of course, but the attitude expressed is common enough.)
Quality of opportunity is exactly what we all want. Try to help more women into IT not by favouring them, but by simply removing barriers to them even applying and letting the best candidate win.
Any evidence that there's actually a problem once women graduate? (Women being dissuaded from technical interests in middle and high school is a real and studied problem, of course.) All the companies I've worked for actually did favor women in the recruiting (but not interview) process. I've done plenty of "new college grad" interview days that the field of candidates that were flown in were 40-50% female, which sure as heck isn't the ratio of grads. We interview everyone the same of course, but every place I've been for the past decade has made a special effort to try to recruit women at the start of the process.
The only people who are offended are the ones being called out for defending the indefensible
Sure, by your definition accusations by a feminist have no possible defense, I guess? OTOH, painting the vast and diverse world of "gamers" with a stereotype that's only relevant to the few games that are predominately teenage boys is bigoted and unfair. (If your argument is "14-year-olds are rude and should behave better", you're preaching to the quire, also they should get off my lawn!)
attacks on anyone are not acceptable
... they say, and then go on to vigorously attack "gamers", starting a culture war that won't soon end.
Students give the University hush money, gets a slap on the hand "oh noez, no free wireless for up to a few months" and the University profits. Copyright holders are not seeing a penny of this money, Law enforcement is not prosecuting people for theft.
In what way is downloading copyrighted material any kind of crime? Is it even a tort?
Should the University fine rapists for profit and not turn them over to Law enforcement as well? Oh wait, this already happens in the US (if people are charged at all)
What are you on about? The standard for accusation at a US university is vastly below any judicial standard for rape. At some places, the accused isn't even given a chance to defend himself.
"Harvard's policy was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense." -- Alan Dershowitz
Every third-wave feminist is, along with most SJWs.
which by practically every metric shows that women are at a disadvantage in society
They have every advantage in family law. There are colleges where men are just assumed guilty of any charge of sexual assault, and cannot even question their accusers in the adjudication process. There's no wage gap for those under about 35 if you adjust for hours worked. Sure, there are certainly still areas like "competitive power lifting" where women are at a disadvantage, but so what?
We (feminists) want everyone to be equal,
Clearly you don't. You say this a lot, some of you (others wear shirts saying "I bathe in male tears"), but then go on to claim that women need special treatment in one way or another.
Equality in society means equality of opportunity: the same rules apply to all, the same social services are available to all, blind to sex and race. It does not mean equality of outcome. Different individuals make different choices, and have different skills and abilities, and the very nature of liberty is that your success in life is influenced by all of that.
Everyone has the right to walk their own path to happiness. You don't get to define "success" for another, you can only measure it against what people chose to pursue in life. You also can't guarantee that people will succeed even there: some people pick a stupid path to their goal.
Even if "the woman" said gamers were werewolf pedophiles from Mars, the backlash from the community demonstrated that what she said was true
Ah, so it's the victim's fault then? 8 Gaming sites/magazines simultaneously published articles attacking "gamers", which is to say, their readers. It's not a leap to deduce that something is rotten in the state of gaming journalism.
The core issue here seems to actually be semantics, oddly enough. People have legitimate complaints about the culture of the tiny corner of gaming that includes CoD and similar games, and call those people "gamers". But anyone who plays Candycrush or WoW or that PvZ shooter or whatever 20+ hours a week is every bit as much a "hardcore gamer", and the overall population was incensed by the offensive stereotyping. Funny how that works.
If these are on 24x7 you're going to be paying through the nose
Check out he prices for EC2 reserved instances, if you know you'll need that server for 3 years. Prices are similar per core to buying entry-level Dell rackmount servers with 3-year support contracts. Of course, the physical Dell has more memory and disk than the VM with the same core count, so you come out ahead there if you needs lots of memory, or local disk, but not by a lot.
I help develop and operate a service that makes a hefty sum by doing all those things you deride, implementation-wise. It all works quite well - well enough that if routing patching causes any customer-visible disruption, you're in for extensive analysis, paperwork, and perhaps ritual abasement before an angry VP.
Yes, yes, there are many technical problems involved with consuming "eventual consistency". In the 20th century these problems were seen as blocking, and anyway just buy a bigger DB server. But the 20th century was along time ago, and while there's still a need for a transactional store, most problems can be solved without one, given sufficient thought - and at sufficient scale, it's really worth figuring out how.
Not that safe patching is incompatible with SQL, of course. In my last job we routinely pushed patches to farms of many thousands of SQL servers, and again if there was any disruption visible to the mid-tier, important people would become seriously angry about that, and we didn't use fancy servers, beyond RAID controllers (and even that concession I abhorred). It's always safe for a single server to fail, or be rebooted for maintenance, and if two servers holding your primary copies of the same data should fail, you better have taken serious, well-reviewed steps in planning to limit the number of DBs affected and the minutes of data lost and the minutes until you're back up.
And even that, which was a nice system, feels outdated now that Amazon went and announced this, which productizes the modern SQL DB and wraps it up in a pretty bow./jealous
About 40% of my servers would have serious issues with that. From SAP systems to certain SQL jobs. That would be a resume writing event.
SAP? SQL? Party like it's 1999! For me, having it matter whether any given server suddenly fails would be a career limiting move. We push-restart patches to services every week or two, and if that affects a customer in any way TSHTF.
Well, I guess that would be technically correct (the best kind of correct!) if true, since 85% of matter is whatever dark matter is. Our matter is the weird stuff.
It can't be "ordinary baryonic matter": we know it doesn't interact with photons even at extreme energy densities, and we also know it doesn't move at or near the speed of light. Both are clear from the CMBR data.
1) Why are you wrangling with project management systems? The amount of time you spend with that should be minimal, otherwise it's hurting you. Are you trying to update all the features to the next sprint or something? That's a waste of time, don't do it.
Large companies often require multiple levels of approvals, often from teams in multiple time zones, before you can even get on with the business of coding. A couple years back I had a project where getting the approval took 6 weeks, and the code took one day (yes, I left that company not long after).
2) If you need to 'translate user requirements from PMs' on a regular basis, it sounds like you are micro-managing a part of the process. If that's the case, then you can gain efficiencies by teaching your developers to do that. Push as many responsibilities down to the developers as you can, and watch how much more focused, effective, and efficient they become
Indeed. But junior developers, almost by definition, aren't good at this. Most large software actually corps have this firmly in their interview process: give the candidate ambiguous requirements, and see whether he asks clarifying questions or just jumps in and codes some arbitrary take on the problem. It's a good way to assess the senior-ness of a candidate.
Practically, "how big of a design/project can you own" is the best measure of a developer. A senior dev drags projects across the finish line despite all the obstacles created by the company being stupid. A junior dev can follow clear requirements, but gets stuck and needs help at every ambiguity (or worse, doesn't get stuck and just solves some arbitrary problem).
And I'm certainly not a manager. Tried that once - my ability to anticipate people problems before they happened were sorely lacking. But managers should be focused on the people first, and the technology only enough to tell when a developer is BSing (or just wrong) about the difficulty of some task. Making decisions about how to staff competing projects so that the best work gets done, morale stays high, and devs grow their skill set - that's hard work. Preventing personality clashes, recruiting, firing people who aren't making the cut, that's all hard work. That why there are senior devs - to provide technical leadership so that the managers can get on with the people leadership.
Yup, very strong programmers certainly exist, but "10x" the code is not the reason they're strong. It's a pet peeve of mine, because writing that code generator instead of the 10x model classes looks like you're doing less work, to naive managers.
I don't see how you can scale well if you're not efficient in the first place.
I know you were talking about people, but that line made me laugh - imagine saying that about code in this century.
Your argument seems to imply that you believe being a rockstar programmer and a great leader are mutually exclusive,
Nope, I'm just saying that banging out lots of code is really important for your first promotion, after that it's still good, but becomes less important as you advance. "10x" is just a silly name for a talent agency.
Rock Star == Prima Donna == show off glory hound. You need a new word for what you're talking about. Legendary maybe isn't it either, unless there's a Prose Edda of coder adventures I haven't read yet. What you describe is what, without title inflation, gets called a Principal Engineer or Fellow. Most big companies treasure them, and they certainly don't need agents.
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.
I've work with multiple people like that throughout my career. I've done fun tricks myself like fixing a bug in a production system that couldn't be rebooted by just editing the contents of memory, quickly debugged software we didn't have the source code for by stepping through the object, debugged complex systems from hex dumps of memory (just a print-out and a mark-1 eyeball for tools). None of that really holds a candle to not having the bugs in production in the first place, which in turn is far less important than building the product the customer actually wants, instead of what they ask for.
The better you are, the more likely it is someone less good will have to maintain your code, debug your clever multi-threaded tricks without your insight, answer customer calls asking "why is it doing this" and so on. You can only do so much yourself - how good are you at making your team more productive? How much can you teach? How well do you test and document? How good are you at working with that team 12 timezones away that your whole project depends on? How good are you at spotting the 3 candidates in a sea of dozens of interviews that are as good as you, and making sure they get hired?
Banging out code is an important part of the job, to be sure, and is probably all that matters for a junior dev. But the more senior you are, the more it matters how well your skills scale with team size.
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.
Was about to post the same: worked with a programmer once who was in a reasonably successful second-tier rock band (they were big enough in Japan to tour there each year with their vacation time).
It's a network effect - you hire where you can find lots of skilled workers, and the worker move to where companies are hiring. Silly Valley is the largest hub, but on the West Coast there a fair pool of jobs in LA associated with Hollywood, and a large and fast-growing pool in Seattle where MS and Amazon are headquartered, and many other large companies have offices to mine that talent pool.
You will be the first one let go when the hammer falls.
No, I really won't. Cheapskate organizations don't hire senior devs in the first place: only managers are paid well. Mature software shops, on the other hand, value devs on the technical track highly - they're harder to hire than managers. Especially once you get past the equivalent of first-level managers: Principle Engineers (or whatever you call the equivalent to a second-level manager) are golden. Middle management comes and goes with every re-org, but those few guys who work as engineers at that level certainly don't need agents - I know my company has an entire team of recruiters that do nothing but look for those guys.
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.
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Nah, Tom's been this way from the beginning.
Congress has abdicated its responsibility to serve the public interest by openly declaring that it will oppose any initiative by the President just for spite.
Open declaration? Surely you have a link to the speech about "just for spite"? You're not just making that up, right?
Even so, the congress has that power under the Constitution. The Congress is in charge of America, per the Constitution. The President, as leader of the executive has the job of executing the laws created by Congress, you know, the legislative branch, the lawmakers.
It's no wonder that he's forced to seek alternative solutions to get anything done.
It's his job to "get done" those laws that the Congress passes. Simply choosing not to enforce those laws because he doesn't like them is rather the opposite of his job. As the leader of the Democratic party, OTOH, he had a different path for many years to "get stuff done", a constitutional one! The American voters deliberately took that power away in the recent election, if you believe that democracy is important.
Which is all good in theory... until the parliament/congress becomes more interesting with infighting and navel gazing than actually improving the country.
If there's no strong consensus as to the best way to improve the country, better to do nothing that try something that "seemed good at the time". But in any case inaction is better than ignoring the Constitution.
And if it takes an unconstitutional tyrant to get us back on the proper track, so be it
Has there ever, ever been an unconstitutional tyrant who seized control for the betterment of the governed? I can think of a couple of cases where someone seized power militarily, then went on to create a constitution and parliament, rare as that is, but "El Presidente for Life"? Not so much.
I'm sure you'll have no regrets if a hyper-religious-conservative ends up with tyrannical control? Because you really think the problem is democracy, rather than getting your way, right?
Method matters. Obama's actions are appaling and well on the way to destroying the country for reason that have nothing to do with immigration. Immigration is a distraction at this point.
It's the constitutional issues that matter - it's been 800 years of wars to establish in Western culture that parliaments, not kings, are ultimately in charge. Ignoring the will of Congress and just making proclamations is a serious structural problem. Now we'll see if congress will do anything about this, or simply give up their position as a co-equal branch of government.
The House has the power to stop anything the government does, but they would have to actually take a stand for once. I'm not holding my breath for that: the idea that a majority of congresscritters would actually care more about governing than fundraising --- well, it's hard to take seriously.
Can you point out some of the special treatment that feminists are asking for, with a citation of them asking for it? I think you are making this shit up because every mainstream feminist I have read or listened to is just interested in equality.
Oh, you've missed the calls to fix the income inequality gap by just taxing men an extra 25% and giving it to women? You've missed the continuous refrain of every SJW ever that what offends women is all-important, but what offends just men is irrelevant? You've missed the suggestion that the best plan is to just kill 95% of men and jail the rest on an island somewhere so they can't cause any harm to real people? I see that kind of shit all the time.
But this says it all, really. (That's Jessica Valenti, of course, but the attitude expressed is common enough.)
Quality of opportunity is exactly what we all want. Try to help more women into IT not by favouring them, but by simply removing barriers to them even applying and letting the best candidate win.
Any evidence that there's actually a problem once women graduate? (Women being dissuaded from technical interests in middle and high school is a real and studied problem, of course.) All the companies I've worked for actually did favor women in the recruiting (but not interview) process. I've done plenty of "new college grad" interview days that the field of candidates that were flown in were 40-50% female, which sure as heck isn't the ratio of grads. We interview everyone the same of course, but every place I've been for the past decade has made a special effort to try to recruit women at the start of the process.
The only people who are offended are the ones being called out for defending the indefensible
Sure, by your definition accusations by a feminist have no possible defense, I guess? OTOH, painting the vast and diverse world of "gamers" with a stereotype that's only relevant to the few games that are predominately teenage boys is bigoted and unfair. (If your argument is "14-year-olds are rude and should behave better", you're preaching to the quire, also they should get off my lawn!)
attacks on anyone are not acceptable
... they say, and then go on to vigorously attack "gamers", starting a culture war that won't soon end.
Students give the University hush money, gets a slap on the hand "oh noez, no free wireless for up to a few months" and the University profits. Copyright holders are not seeing a penny of this money, Law enforcement is not prosecuting people for theft.
In what way is downloading copyrighted material any kind of crime? Is it even a tort?
Should the University fine rapists for profit and not turn them over to Law enforcement as well? Oh wait, this already happens in the US (if people are charged at all)
What are you on about? The standard for accusation at a US university is vastly below any judicial standard for rape. At some places, the accused isn't even given a chance to defend himself.
"Harvard's policy was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense." -- Alan Dershowitz
Indeed. Being a top-notch developer is about making your team great.
No-one is asking for special treatment
Every third-wave feminist is, along with most SJWs.
which by practically every metric shows that women are at a disadvantage in society
They have every advantage in family law. There are colleges where men are just assumed guilty of any charge of sexual assault, and cannot even question their accusers in the adjudication process. There's no wage gap for those under about 35 if you adjust for hours worked. Sure, there are certainly still areas like "competitive power lifting" where women are at a disadvantage, but so what?
We (feminists) want everyone to be equal,
Clearly you don't. You say this a lot, some of you (others wear shirts saying "I bathe in male tears"), but then go on to claim that women need special treatment in one way or another.
Equality in society means equality of opportunity: the same rules apply to all, the same social services are available to all, blind to sex and race. It does not mean equality of outcome. Different individuals make different choices, and have different skills and abilities, and the very nature of liberty is that your success in life is influenced by all of that.
Everyone has the right to walk their own path to happiness. You don't get to define "success" for another, you can only measure it against what people chose to pursue in life. You also can't guarantee that people will succeed even there: some people pick a stupid path to their goal.
Even if "the woman" said gamers were werewolf pedophiles from Mars, the backlash from the community demonstrated that what she said was true
Ah, so it's the victim's fault then? 8 Gaming sites/magazines simultaneously published articles attacking "gamers", which is to say, their readers. It's not a leap to deduce that something is rotten in the state of gaming journalism.
The core issue here seems to actually be semantics, oddly enough. People have legitimate complaints about the culture of the tiny corner of gaming that includes CoD and similar games, and call those people "gamers". But anyone who plays Candycrush or WoW or that PvZ shooter or whatever 20+ hours a week is every bit as much a "hardcore gamer", and the overall population was incensed by the offensive stereotyping. Funny how that works.
Did it also include a 3D init system? Something tells me I'd prefer that to systemd...
Sorry, system3d is two versions away.
If these are on 24x7 you're going to be paying through the nose
Check out he prices for EC2 reserved instances, if you know you'll need that server for 3 years. Prices are similar per core to buying entry-level Dell rackmount servers with 3-year support contracts. Of course, the physical Dell has more memory and disk than the VM with the same core count, so you come out ahead there if you needs lots of memory, or local disk, but not by a lot.
I help develop and operate a service that makes a hefty sum by doing all those things you deride, implementation-wise. It all works quite well - well enough that if routing patching causes any customer-visible disruption, you're in for extensive analysis, paperwork, and perhaps ritual abasement before an angry VP.
Yes, yes, there are many technical problems involved with consuming "eventual consistency". In the 20th century these problems were seen as blocking, and anyway just buy a bigger DB server. But the 20th century was along time ago, and while there's still a need for a transactional store, most problems can be solved without one, given sufficient thought - and at sufficient scale, it's really worth figuring out how.
Not that safe patching is incompatible with SQL, of course. In my last job we routinely pushed patches to farms of many thousands of SQL servers, and again if there was any disruption visible to the mid-tier, important people would become seriously angry about that, and we didn't use fancy servers, beyond RAID controllers (and even that concession I abhorred). It's always safe for a single server to fail, or be rebooted for maintenance, and if two servers holding your primary copies of the same data should fail, you better have taken serious, well-reviewed steps in planning to limit the number of DBs affected and the minutes of data lost and the minutes until you're back up.
And even that, which was a nice system, feels outdated now that Amazon went and announced this, which productizes the modern SQL DB and wraps it up in a pretty bow. /jealous
About 40% of my servers would have serious issues with that. From SAP systems to certain SQL jobs. That would be a resume writing event.
SAP? SQL? Party like it's 1999! For me, having it matter whether any given server suddenly fails would be a career limiting move. We push-restart patches to services every week or two, and if that affects a customer in any way TSHTF.
"Quark nuggets" are ordinary?
Well, I guess that would be technically correct (the best kind of correct!) if true, since 85% of matter is whatever dark matter is. Our matter is the weird stuff.
It can't be "ordinary baryonic matter": we know it doesn't interact with photons even at extreme energy densities, and we also know it doesn't move at or near the speed of light. Both are clear from the CMBR data.
1) Why are you wrangling with project management systems? The amount of time you spend with that should be minimal, otherwise it's hurting you. Are you trying to update all the features to the next sprint or something? That's a waste of time, don't do it.
Large companies often require multiple levels of approvals, often from teams in multiple time zones, before you can even get on with the business of coding. A couple years back I had a project where getting the approval took 6 weeks, and the code took one day (yes, I left that company not long after).
2) If you need to 'translate user requirements from PMs' on a regular basis, it sounds like you are micro-managing a part of the process. If that's the case, then you can gain efficiencies by teaching your developers to do that. Push as many responsibilities down to the developers as you can, and watch how much more focused, effective, and efficient they become
Indeed. But junior developers, almost by definition, aren't good at this. Most large software actually corps have this firmly in their interview process: give the candidate ambiguous requirements, and see whether he asks clarifying questions or just jumps in and codes some arbitrary take on the problem. It's a good way to assess the senior-ness of a candidate.
Practically, "how big of a design/project can you own" is the best measure of a developer. A senior dev drags projects across the finish line despite all the obstacles created by the company being stupid. A junior dev can follow clear requirements, but gets stuck and needs help at every ambiguity (or worse, doesn't get stuck and just solves some arbitrary problem).
And I'm certainly not a manager. Tried that once - my ability to anticipate people problems before they happened were sorely lacking. But managers should be focused on the people first, and the technology only enough to tell when a developer is BSing (or just wrong) about the difficulty of some task. Making decisions about how to staff competing projects so that the best work gets done, morale stays high, and devs grow their skill set - that's hard work. Preventing personality clashes, recruiting, firing people who aren't making the cut, that's all hard work. That why there are senior devs - to provide technical leadership so that the managers can get on with the people leadership.
Yup, very strong programmers certainly exist, but "10x" the code is not the reason they're strong. It's a pet peeve of mine, because writing that code generator instead of the 10x model classes looks like you're doing less work, to naive managers.
I don't see how you can scale well if you're not efficient in the first place.
I know you were talking about people, but that line made me laugh - imagine saying that about code in this century.
Your argument seems to imply that you believe being a rockstar programmer and a great leader are mutually exclusive,
Nope, I'm just saying that banging out lots of code is really important for your first promotion, after that it's still good, but becomes less important as you advance. "10x" is just a silly name for a talent agency.
Rock Star == Prima Donna == show off glory hound. You need a new word for what you're talking about. Legendary maybe isn't it either, unless there's a Prose Edda of coder adventures I haven't read yet. What you describe is what, without title inflation, gets called a Principal Engineer or Fellow. Most big companies treasure them, and they certainly don't need agents.
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.
I've work with multiple people like that throughout my career. I've done fun tricks myself like fixing a bug in a production system that couldn't be rebooted by just editing the contents of memory, quickly debugged software we didn't have the source code for by stepping through the object, debugged complex systems from hex dumps of memory (just a print-out and a mark-1 eyeball for tools). None of that really holds a candle to not having the bugs in production in the first place, which in turn is far less important than building the product the customer actually wants, instead of what they ask for.
The better you are, the more likely it is someone less good will have to maintain your code, debug your clever multi-threaded tricks without your insight, answer customer calls asking "why is it doing this" and so on. You can only do so much yourself - how good are you at making your team more productive? How much can you teach? How well do you test and document? How good are you at working with that team 12 timezones away that your whole project depends on? How good are you at spotting the 3 candidates in a sea of dozens of interviews that are as good as you, and making sure they get hired?
Banging out code is an important part of the job, to be sure, and is probably all that matters for a junior dev. But the more senior you are, the more it matters how well your skills scale with team size.
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.
Was about to post the same: worked with a programmer once who was in a reasonably successful second-tier rock band (they were big enough in Japan to tour there each year with their vacation time).
It's a network effect - you hire where you can find lots of skilled workers, and the worker move to where companies are hiring. Silly Valley is the largest hub, but on the West Coast there a fair pool of jobs in LA associated with Hollywood, and a large and fast-growing pool in Seattle where MS and Amazon are headquartered, and many other large companies have offices to mine that talent pool.
You will be the first one let go when the hammer falls.
No, I really won't. Cheapskate organizations don't hire senior devs in the first place: only managers are paid well. Mature software shops, on the other hand, value devs on the technical track highly - they're harder to hire than managers. Especially once you get past the equivalent of first-level managers: Principle Engineers (or whatever you call the equivalent to a second-level manager) are golden. Middle management comes and goes with every re-org, but those few guys who work as engineers at that level certainly don't need agents - I know my company has an entire team of recruiters that do nothing but look for those guys.
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.