Right and wrong is, roughly speaking, defined based on what is good for society as a whole, balanced against the needs of the individual. It has nothing to do with some higher or cosmic absolute truth.
I can't find it viscerally in me to take moral issue with the guy releasing the code. I understand it belongs to Blizzard, but I just don't feel sorry for them. Not defending that, just stating a fact about the absence of an emotion in me.
That said: if you believe the guy would've been right to distribute the code, it follows that you believe the right thing for Blizzard to do is to release the code themselves. Instead of arguing morality here, one might spend one's energy articulating that argument to Blizzard instead.
Arguing that 10x developers don't exist strikes me as the extraordinary position requiring extraordinary evidence, rather than the inverse. People vary; why wouldn't they here?
Some people argue, essentially, "programming is complicated," but even if you want to claim that programming consists of multiple dimensions along which programmers can be measured, how about when one person outperforms another on every dimension by a factor of ten? What should we call that other than one person being ten times better than another?
Other people argue that while 10x developers may exist, teamwork matters far more. Well, what do you suppose would happen then if you managed to assemble a team of only 10x developers?
People vary yes, but do we have 10x variation in performance? Actually for 10x to be a meaningful size, would need significantly more variation.
Can one find support for such level of variation in other, more well studied fields? Say students, managers, factory workers?
Sorry for the downvotes; I upvoted you to correct. I think it's an interesting question. There are probably fields where it's possible and fields where it's not.
Some students certainly outperform others by a factor of ten. I'd hesitate to score managers numerically, but it seems plausible that working for one could feel ten times more smooth or whatever than working for another, whatever that means. Intuitively, probably not factory workers, but prove me wrong.
10x is not actually that much. I could play basketball with Michael Jordan or chess with Magnus Carlsen, and they'd win essentially an infinite number of games against me without losing once. That doesn't mean they're infinitely better, because theoretically I could through practice become as good as them, but the factor is way more than 10.
Re 'factory worker'. When I studied, I worked part-time in a shop selling bicycles. One of my main tasks was assembling & tuning the bicycles (they come flatpacked). I recall that on my first day (as a 14 year old with no prior experience), I could only complete one bike, with another one in progress. The teaching was mostly 'here are the tools, tell us when done/stuck'. A couple years, maybe 1000 hours of experience later, I would average around 3 bikes per hour. So, a factor 12-15 speedup.
This was basically as fast as the guys who had been doing it 20-30 years full-time. I stayed basically at that level until I stopped at 6 years. Note, this was no sweatshop, just a pretty active and successful self-owned store.
It is possible that those that assemble Ikea furniture for a living have 10x over a typical Ikea-buyer.
I can also do programming things in 1x which friends who fiddle with Arduinos can't do in 10x the time. But they are non-professionals, and may even stuggle with fizzbuzz.
But in a professional setting I've yet to meet a single developer I would claim to 10x. Probably not even 5x. Unless one would look isolated at tasks that requires specialized or domain knowledge which the other person doesn't happen to have. And I'm pretty sure there would be tasks where same person would nX me.
> However, as soon as you have a slightly larger team, these decisions will usually not be made by one single person. If you have a large project with dozens or hundreds of engineers, you'll have dedicated teams for some of these tasks, making their own desicions.
Another interpretation of this is that 10x programmers get dragged down when they have to work on teams that are too large or don't grant autonomy.
I found the thread interesting and informative up until she drew her conclusion:
Elon Musk doesn't strike me as an innovator when he talks about building tunnels and subways. He strikes me as Robert Moses. Who are these tunnels going to serve? The Latino communities in LA? Or are we just running them straight to the rich neighborhoods?
It's hard for me to believe someone doesn't have an axe to grind when they make statements like this. On what basis does this person claim that Elon Musk bears resemblance to Robert Moses?
This is my problem with many politics-in-tech discussions. People who take politics seriously say, "technology always has political implications." True enough; we do indeed seem to forget that. They stir some history into their argument. Even better. But once they have to perform analysis, free of the rigorous standards of thought you have in e.g. math or science, they start saying baseless things.
I don't see this as baseless to be honest. As someone in the camp of "technology always has political implications", one of the interesting trends I've seen with tech is that most of the benefits go to the rich first. In some ways yes, that makes sense. The problem is when they never transition to the whole population effectively. Take subways, a well-defined technology at this point. Pretty much every city you look at, there's a minority community without proper access because the city sees the cost as not worth it to build the additional line or pay for service. The Orange Line and Roxbury come to mind in Boston, who instead got a talked up bus system to replace a line moved out of a minority community.
When you see a technology like this and think of the benefits, considering who gets those benefits is a big part of the value of the idea practically. To me, it's nothing against the ideas technological merit, academic impressiveness, creative ingenuity, etc. It does reflect what ideas someone like Musk is focused on though, and I don't think bringing it up inherently means they have an axe to grind. I think Elon is doing a ton of good and is one of the few SV bigshots that deserves hype (looks sideways at Peter Thiel), but we should have realistic views on who his projects are exactly helping both short and long term.
I hear what you're saying and actually agree. The somewhat pedantic point I was making earlier was just that the author could've more conservatively written, "here are some possible dangers down this path which we should think carefully about."
(Sorry for replying to a long, substantive comment with a short one; I just don't have anything to add.)
That disagrees with the Twitter thread you linked to, which claims:
> Robert Moses weaponized Civil Engineering and Urban Planning to suppress marginalized communities. Engineering is always political.
Words like "weaponized" and "suppress" suggest that Emily thinks Moses was ill-intentioned, not merely an ambitious guy who in his monomania happened to overlook some of the more sinister side-effects of his work.
I don't entirely agree with the Twitter thread, but it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do. Overly-influential people exerting their power to harm others in the interest of what they believe to be "right" is something that bothers me a lot about the power structure of our industry today. I don't think the comparison is at all unwarranted.
it's also possible to "weaponize" and "suppress" because you think it's the right thing to do
How does that have anything to do with whether he was horrible? In general, people think they're doing the right thing. That doesn't mean they're not horrible.
The entire point of The Power Broker is that Moses was ill-intentioned. He deliberately built his projects in ways that froze NYC's minorities out from being able to benefit from them, destroyed healthy neighborhoods when they tried to stop him, and bankrupted the city building highways it didn't need because every new highway project increased his personal political power.
