The 10x rule is that the best developers are 10x as productive as the worst 10 developers. That's all it says. So you can replace them with 10 worse developers, that's the whole frickin' point of the 10x rule.
I am not aware of any study that shows that arbitrarily complex tasks (a distributed operating system, an AI project such as Watson, an airplane fly-by-wire system...) can be completed solely by a sufficient number of bottom-of-the-barrel programmers. I don't recall any such claim in The Mythical Man-Month, but it has been a while since I read it - perhaps you could cite the chapter that references such a study, so I can look it up in my copy?
There's no point in trying to assign a ratio to it, because the worst developers have zero or negative productivity, on account of the damage that they do to projects by checking in inordinately complicated code that fails mysteriously, or simply by messing up everyone else's schedule by failing to deliver their part. This is not a hypothetical argument; I have several specific people from my personal experience of corporate development in mind (all in the past, fortunately.)
Thank you for your highly informative comment about Goldman Sachs indemnifying its employees for legal fees.
It seems that Goldman Sachs may be hoist by its own petard here, if the intent behind this provision was, at least in part, to enable 'aggressive' behavior by its officers and employees (i.e. to flirt with arguably illegal behavior).
Perhaps this is getting off-topic, but the Greek government hired Goldman Sachs precisely because it wanted to adopt 'sharp practices' in hiding its growing economic crisis.
You are not the only person here to make a case against the conviction on the basis of the meaning of 'stealing', but such arguments don't get anywhere, as the law contains precise definition of what the word is intended to mean in this case (if it actually says 'stealing', which I doubt.) A more pertinent question might be how a matter that should fall under civil / contract law has been turned into a criminal offense.
On the other hand, your characterization of Goldman Sachs' behavior is spot-on.
I am not shocked, but I am confused. Why would they give bad software to their customers, but give good software to the testers? The marginal cost of software is zero.
The good software is not theirs, it is Bitdefender's, and it does not have a zero marginal cost unless they steal it. That would not be unknown, of course, but this company may be too large, and have big enough aspirations, for that not to be an option.
I also tend to agree with those who suspect they are selling to customers who don't like to be reminded that using keygens is risky.
Very few of the tests out there check for false positives, so it is easy to game the results.
I see. In that case, shouldn't the story be "AV Tests are Stupid" rather than "Chinese Company Sort of Cheats on a Test Designed to Make Cheating Easy"?
No, the testing organizations here are competent. It is the "let's have the intern do an antivirus review" articles in publications having no particular reputation in security matters that should be treated with suspicion.
And those that are labeling a score of 39/100 "not bad at all" should have their head checked.
At least they should have their studies replicated.
The comment that several of the failed replications were "broadly similar" but failed to reach statistical significance leads me to wonder if there has been any data cherry-picking in some of the original studies.
Indeed. There is a widespread fallacy, in business as well as education, that any number you can assign to something is inherently meaningful, and conversely, if you cannot assign an 'objective' quantity to something, it must not be important. I suspect that business schools have done a lot to spread this fallacy (including into education), though I don't have the numbers to prove it...
I have to disagree with the statement that content doesn't matter. Without considering the content, you cannot judge whether the student is displaying reasoning and making cogent arguments, or merely faking it. <curmudgeon> it seems to me that the number of people I deal with who cannot tell the difference is increasing - a coincidence? Perhaps not. Murdoch has made a political movement out of exploiting such people.</curmudgeon>
If you say you cannot do a fair test if content is considered, that is not an argument for dumbing it down to pointlessness; it is an argument for doing it a different way or not doing it at all. In reality, you can set meaningful essay questions, that test a student's critical analysis and reasoning skills, within the context of the humanities and sciences.
AI is not ready to do this task properly, but, at least in the US, human grading has sometimes been dumbed-down to the point where you would not even need current 'AI' to do as well, as prof. Perelman of MIT has demonstrated - e.g: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opi...
For every case like this, you can find cases where engineers and/or their employers made really bad choices when left to their own devices. The outcome of the Pinto case, and others like it, should not only be judged by the specific issue, but also by their cumulative effect in encouraging manufacturers to be proactively cautious (though that is hard to measure.)
That's an interesting comment about the phase delay. My impression as I watched the video was that the rocket behavior resembled the pilot-induced oscillations that can occur when a pilot's responses lag too far behind the events.
The article doesn't contain any evidence that the cost of operating in Australia was a significant part of the problem, but it does contain evidence that the management pissed off a significant part of the company's talent.
Here is a quote from the Zakaria article to think about: 'Critical thinking is, in the end, the only way to protect American jobs.' His implication is that the humanities are a bastion of critical thinking. But when an introductory student is asked to do actual critical thinking where they might be wrong (i.e. introductory engineering, science, and math courses) they often conclude that they would rather go to the arts or humanities where the requirements of critical thinking are not as high.
I broadly agree, but I would like to offer a couple of additional points. Firstly, there are fact-based disciplines within the humanities. Secondly, STEM (especially the technology and engineering parts) can be (mis)taught in a 'how-to' style that is light on critical thinking and in-depth understanding.
The summary shows the problem with big data: it's not the data that counts, it's what you do with it. And no algorithm in the world can make you make good decisions.
So the problem with pens is that no writing tool in the world can make you a good writer?
You had me for a second, but this is not a valid analogy. The valid analogy would require someone to say that their analysis has found the pen that will make you a good writer.
Just for a moment, I wished the the squeegee guys were back. I would like to see an interaction between a squeegee guy and this car at the exit of the Lincoln tunnel.
True, but this suit offers a libertarian alternative to government regulation, and hopefully will achieve the same outcome.
Who or what runs the legal system? And why would the manufacturers respond with anything other than 'fuck off - we will do what we like' to a judgment against them?
This is not the libertarian alternative. That would be that you can choose not to buy a car until some manufacturer deigns to build one that is secure - or you can build one yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
The 10x rule is that the best developers are 10x as productive as the worst 10 developers. That's all it says. So you can replace them with 10 worse developers, that's the whole frickin' point of the 10x rule.
I am not aware of any study that shows that arbitrarily complex tasks (a distributed operating system, an AI project such as Watson, an airplane fly-by-wire system...) can be completed solely by a sufficient number of bottom-of-the-barrel programmers. I don't recall any such claim in The Mythical Man-Month, but it has been a while since I read it - perhaps you could cite the chapter that references such a study, so I can look it up in my copy?
It's not bimodal but 10x rule still applies.
There's no point in trying to assign a ratio to it, because the worst developers have zero or negative productivity, on account of the damage that they do to projects by checking in inordinately complicated code that fails mysteriously, or simply by messing up everyone else's schedule by failing to deliver their part. This is not a hypothetical argument; I have several specific people from my personal experience of corporate development in mind (all in the past, fortunately.)
You would have to poll all of them to establish that.
Thank you for your highly informative comment about Goldman Sachs indemnifying its employees for legal fees.
It seems that Goldman Sachs may be hoist by its own petard here, if the intent behind this provision was, at least in part, to enable 'aggressive' behavior by its officers and employees (i.e. to flirt with arguably illegal behavior).
Perhaps this is getting off-topic, but the Greek government hired Goldman Sachs precisely because it wanted to adopt 'sharp practices' in hiding its growing economic crisis.
You are not the only person here to make a case against the conviction on the basis of the meaning of 'stealing', but such arguments don't get anywhere, as the law contains precise definition of what the word is intended to mean in this case (if it actually says 'stealing', which I doubt.) A more pertinent question might be how a matter that should fall under civil / contract law has been turned into a criminal offense.
On the other hand, your characterization of Goldman Sachs' behavior is spot-on.
I am not shocked, but I am confused. Why would they give bad software to their customers, but give good software to the testers? The marginal cost of software is zero.
The good software is not theirs, it is Bitdefender's, and it does not have a zero marginal cost unless they steal it. That would not be unknown, of course, but this company may be too large, and have big enough aspirations, for that not to be an option.
I also tend to agree with those who suspect they are selling to customers who don't like to be reminded that using keygens is risky.
Very few of the tests out there check for false positives, so it is easy to game the results.
I see. In that case, shouldn't the story be "AV Tests are Stupid" rather than "Chinese Company Sort of Cheats on a Test Designed to Make Cheating Easy"?
No, the testing organizations here are competent. It is the "let's have the intern do an antivirus review" articles in publications having no particular reputation in security matters that should be treated with suspicion.
And those that are labeling a score of 39/100 "not bad at all" should have their head checked.
At least they should have their studies replicated.
The comment that several of the failed replications were "broadly similar" but failed to reach statistical significance leads me to wonder if there has been any data cherry-picking in some of the original studies.
Indeed. There is a widespread fallacy, in business as well as education, that any number you can assign to something is inherently meaningful, and conversely, if you cannot assign an 'objective' quantity to something, it must not be important. I suspect that business schools have done a lot to spread this fallacy (including into education), though I don't have the numbers to prove it...
I have to disagree with the statement that content doesn't matter. Without considering the content, you cannot judge whether the student is displaying reasoning and making cogent arguments, or merely faking it. <curmudgeon> it seems to me that the number of people I deal with who cannot tell the difference is increasing - a coincidence? Perhaps not. Murdoch has made a political movement out of exploiting such people.</curmudgeon>
If you say you cannot do a fair test if content is considered, that is not an argument for dumbing it down to pointlessness; it is an argument for doing it a different way or not doing it at all. In reality, you can set meaningful essay questions, that test a student's critical analysis and reasoning skills, within the context of the humanities and sciences.
That would actually be an educationally-useful exercise - much more so than the exam itself.
The title is clickbait, if ever I saw it.
AI is not ready to do this task properly, but, at least in the US, human grading has sometimes been dumbed-down to the point where you would not even need current 'AI' to do as well, as prof. Perelman of MIT has demonstrated - e.g: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opi...
For every case like this, you can find cases where engineers and/or their employers made really bad choices when left to their own devices. The outcome of the Pinto case, and others like it, should not only be judged by the specific issue, but also by their cumulative effect in encouraging manufacturers to be proactively cautious (though that is hard to measure.)
That's an interesting comment about the phase delay. My impression as I watched the video was that the rocket behavior resembled the pilot-induced oscillations that can occur when a pilot's responses lag too far behind the events.
The article doesn't contain any evidence that the cost of operating in Australia was a significant part of the problem, but it does contain evidence that the management pissed off a significant part of the company's talent.
I confine my activities to the antisocial media, such as Slashdot.
Here is a quote from the Zakaria article to think about:
'Critical thinking is, in the end, the only way to protect American jobs.'
His implication is that the humanities are a bastion of critical thinking. But when an introductory student is asked to do actual critical thinking where they might be wrong (i.e. introductory engineering, science, and math courses) they often conclude that they would rather go to the arts or humanities where the requirements of critical thinking are not as high.
I broadly agree, but I would like to offer a couple of additional points. Firstly, there are fact-based disciplines within the humanities. Secondly, STEM (especially the technology and engineering parts) can be (mis)taught in a 'how-to' style that is light on critical thinking and in-depth understanding.
That one word pretty much sums up the trajectory of business and politics today. And neoserf for its plans for us.
The summary shows the problem with big data: it's not the data that counts, it's what you do with it. And no algorithm in the world can make you make good decisions.
So the problem with pens is that no writing tool in the world can make you a good writer?
You had me for a second, but this is not a valid analogy. The valid analogy would require someone to say that their analysis has found the pen that will make you a good writer.
"Is it time for more scientists to speak out openly about raising the level of transparency and honesty in their field?"
It has already happened - that's how you got to hear about it.
Just for a moment, I wished the the squeegee guys were back. I would like to see an interaction between a squeegee guy and this car at the exit of the Lincoln tunnel.
True, but this suit offers a libertarian alternative to government regulation, and hopefully will achieve the same outcome.
Who or what runs the legal system? And why would the manufacturers respond with anything other than 'fuck off - we will do what we like' to a judgment against them?
This is not the libertarian alternative. That would be that you can choose not to buy a car until some manufacturer deigns to build one that is secure - or you can build one yourself.
that water could flow on it?
And what accounts for the difference in surface temperature, given that Mars's orbit didn't shift by that much?
Loss of most of its former atmosphere.