Rubenerd

There’s been another surge of interest in the concept of so-called 10x Engineers on social media, and I’m delighted to see it being called out for the counterproductive and damaging idea it is.

Defining the term

The canonical Silicon Valley Dictionary defines a 10x Engineer as:

A concept sometimes used in Silicon Valley to describe an engineer that is 10x more productive than an average engineer although the 10x metric is figurative. Sometimes referred to as “Ninjas”, these engineers are highly sought after by all tech companies.

Use of the term ninjas is the perennial cake icing. This recruitment site has some more clichés:

10x Engineer @ Surge. Connecting rockstar tech talent with the most disruptive early-stage startups in India & Southeast Asia.

But my favourite definition comes from this nginx-ish 404 page by @theevocatur:

404 Not Found
10x Engineers aren’t real

Attributes that make a 10x Engineer

So now we know what these mystical beasts are, what are their defininig qualities? Codegiant listed the following, which I’ve condensed into a paragraph for easier skimming and to make a point in a moment. Emphasis added:

Curious and always learning. Not just great engineers themselves, but they elevate the work of everyone around them. Able to dive in and and learn new code bases with faster ramp up times. Great at recognizing patterns and replacing procedural code with simple, beautiful methods. The best at debugging code; they don’t need to waste time, because they ID problems quickly and have a solution faster than your average programmer. Extremely well versed in a broad range of languages, tools, and algorithms. Able to quickly recommend the best technical solution based on risk vs. benefit. Always coding; not just at work, but on their own time. Looking at the whole picture and can anticipate problems, and build to avoid them.

There are some good pointers here that would apply to any modern work. Being self motivated and willing to learn, and honing one’s craft to the point where elegant solutions can easily be developed are all important. I’ve been privileged and honoured to work with developers who possess all those qualities.

But there are two points that concern me. “Always coding” guilts people into a permanent state of work: learning on your time isn’t considered a desirable bonus, it’s mandatory. This is how you exploit people with unreasonable hours and destroy life/work balance, which is counterproductive when your staff burn out or quit.

And the larger point is what the list excludes. Read the sentence I highlighted above in the sea of other words. Only one point out of almost a dozen mention interpersonal skills. I shouldn’t be surprised, but this absolutely floors me, like a nicely finished parquet.

Unless you’re working for yourself, you’ll almost certainly be working in a team; and even sole traders often have contractors. Your ability to work constructively and congenially in a group, either as a member or manager, will have a direct impact on a project’s success or failure.

It’s everybody, stupid

The more time I’ve spent as a systems architect now, rather than a developer or a sysadmin, the more I’ve come to realise that humans are as important to IT as the infrastructure itself; perhaps more so. Even the most selfish of managers must realise that hiring a Ninja Rockstar 10x Engineer who brings toxicity and antagonism will ultimately be a net negative. Which is why I was encouraged to see Atlassian’s recent post about performance reviews:

Another common bias that pops up is when companies over-emphasize delivery of results and ignore behaviors that can take a toll on team health and company culture (some refer to this as rewarding the “brilliant jerk”).

Brilliant jerk is such a great term on so many levels, I’m going to start using it.

And as for those developers I mentioned above that I worked with? All of them were lovely people too.

Karl Jobst’s series of SimCity 3000 tips are almost twenty years old, but I still pick them up and learn something new. Here’s his comment about subways in his Transport Department FAQ, emphasis added:

When you’re building a subway station, it must be next to, or directly above a subway rail. If you place a subway on top of a subway, the subway doesn’t just reach a dead end. If you place subway rails on the other side the trains will just move through the station. Not as many people use the subway as they do normal rails, don’t ask me why, they just don’t. When building a subway station, I suggest building it away from a train station.

That jibes—jives?—with my experience as well, particularly with industrial zones that seem to not use subways at all. I used to save a ton of money specifically to build subways, but my most recent cities have all used above ground railways extensively, for two reasons:

1. They’re not as ugly as I used to think they were, and in some cases can be made to look quite attractive with a row of small parks, sloping hills, and other landscaping.

2. Road traffic between industrial and residential areas are lighter with railway lines compared to a mix of rail and subways.

3. I like watching the trains running along!

4. As per Karl’s observation, sims simply use railways more.

These days I tend to leave subways for CBDs, or where there’s a land crunch. In my redesigned Craterville I terminated railway lines before my high density commercial district, with Subway-to-Rail connections at the edge.

Posting about privacy earlier got me thinking about how it’s reported, and specifically a new formula that increasing numbers of articles are following. It’s not X, it’s Y!

Take Facebook. Journalists are claiming the social network’s problem isn’t privacy, it’s Mark Zuckerberg… then expand on why he doesn’t get privacy. They contradict their own thesis with a single degree of separation. I’m not sure if this is the journalistic version of claiming a false equivalence, or a distinction without a difference. But at best it’s disingenuous; at worst, clickbait.

Here’s another example. The problem isn’t that articles claim something else is the real issue, it’s the journalists who write them. Because these journalists write articles about something else being the real issue. It’s not a fresh take, nor does it offer any additional insight, it’s tantamount to deckchair rearrangement.

Certain people on social media have pulled this swifty for years: deliver a steamy hot take, roll their eyes at other people’s simplistic interpretation of a current event, and bathe in the superiority of their intellectual prowess. Only, all they’ve done is narrow down to a specific point that does nothing to invalidate what others are saying at all.

Journalists are subtler; perhaps because they’re generally more honest. But I’m seeing it everywhere since I first noticed this trick.

The tiny Libretto 70CT is one of my all-time favourite computers. I bought one on eBay a decade ago to fulfill a childhood dream, and it’s been so much fun to use. It packs a Pentium 1 CPU, 32 MiB of memory, and a 640x480 VGA display into a tiny case that even by today’s standards is impressive. I’ve blogged about it a few times.

Last weekend’s project was getting it dual-booting with Windows NT 4.0 for nostalgia and because it has drivers, and NetBSD 8.1 because I can. For those asking why, why do people do anything?

You’ve got a few options for dual booting. This NetBSD mailing list thread suggested WinImage BootPart which can add NetBSD to Windows NT’s boot loader, but I decided just to use NetBSD’s.

Getting it dual booting was easier than I expected.

Preparing the boot volume

1. Attach your boot device to an external machine with a hypervisor. Use a 16 GiB CompactFlash card with a 2.5-inch IDE adaptor if you can, it’ll be faster and use less power than spinning rust.

2. Pass the boot device into the hypervisor. I use bhyve, but any Unix-like machine can use QEMU to do this easily too.

Installing Windows NT

1. Boot Windows NT 4.0 from ISO, if you can avoid creating those boot floppies. If the installer detects your VM as an MPS Multiprocessor PC as it does under bhyve, change it to Standard PC or it won’t boot.

2. Partition your drive with sufficient leftover space for NetBSD. I tend to create a 2 GiB NTFS partition, and a 128 MiB FAT32 for sharing data with NetBSD.

3. After that point, it’s a standard install. Let it finish, and restart a couple of times. Copy the drivers from the Toshiba Dynabook website, but don’t install until it’s in the Libretto.

Installing NetBSD

1. Boot the NetBSD 8.1 installer from ISO. At the MBR step, choose Edit the MBR partition table insead of Use the entire disk.

2. At the MBR table editor step, edit the first partition and set its bootmenu to something like NT4. Then add your NetBSD install to partiton B. Set Active to Yes, Install to Yes, and bootmenu to something like NetBSD.

3. The rest of the install is standard. I echewed (gesunteit) X11 for now, because I want to see how much I can get away with using curses-style applications! But I’ll definitely be trying IceVM and Fluxbox on it at some point.

4. Reboot, and you should get NetBSD’s minimal boot loader.

Finishing up

Pop the drive out, put in the Libretto, and you should have your obscurely fabulous Libretto booting what you want.

Booting from Hard Disk...
Fn: diskn
1: NT4
2: NetBSD

Josh Taylor wrote a great article on some advice I’m sure home affairs minister Peter Dutton will ignore:

Victorian [state] information commissioner, Sven Bluemmel … told the digital citizens conference at the University of Melbourne on Wednesday that in his role, in having a responsibility for privacy and information security in Victoria, he tried to reinforce the idea with senior policymakers that they do not need to be making a choice between security and human rights or privacy … “It’s a false dichotomy,” he said.

My American friends would refer us to Thomas Jefferson’s famous quote about those sacrificing liberty for security.

Then again, Australia’s former conservative prime minister John Howard also said Victoria was Australia’s Massachusetts, which I think he meant as an insult, but I’d be proud to hang on my wall. They’re about the only state in Australia run by halfway competent people at this stage, and I say that as someone in NSW.

I tweeted about this inexplicably fabulous new Evangelion merchanise, from Tokyo Otaku Mode:

Alpacassos, with their fluffy fur and round eyes, have grown quickly, but they’ve gotten even bigger! They’ve fused with NERV’s Multipurpose Humanoid Decisive Weapon, Artificial Human Evangelions, and have become cute artiodactyl decisive weapons (?) called Evapacasso!

@maidforclass had the best response:

Eva can’t be used to market everythi… oh, that’s a new one.

What’s your first thought when you see the date on a logo or building? I assume it signifies when either the company or building came into existence, or perhaps at least a predecessor. I wonder how one can be a post-decessor, or a present-decessor?

My boss shared this Singaporean artisan tea merchant, and specifically the hot water they steeped themselves in with their logo in Hong Kong. Wikipedia quoted an article from the Straits Times:

A judge handling the lawsuit noted in July 2013 that the use of the “existence of the date 1837 in TWG Tea’s sign has led people to believe that the company was established at that time”, while in actuality it was founded much later, in 2008. In justification, the firm’s spokespeople claimed that it was instead a tribute to the “year when the Chamber of Commerce was founded in Singapore”

I’m tempted to change the tagline of my blog from 2004-ish to mid-1980s-ish then, by that logic. I preface my own claims with -ish because I only blogged three times in 2004, so even that felt like a stretch.

Boris Johnson was elected Prime Minister of the UK by his party. I can’t say I’m surprised, much as someone can’t be for smelling awful having tripped into an open sewer. But it exposed, admittedly at a smaller scale compared to Mr Orange, the same outpouring of an insidious political idea I’d now argue is more dangerous than apathy.

For want of a better phrase, I’m calling it malicious joy.

Alongside tweets of concern about the result, I saw an equal number of people revelling in it; specifically because they wanted to see butthurt leftists react. Imagine for a second being one of those people… the former I mean, not butthurt leftists. I was only one of the latter because I sat on my office chair funny today and my left cheek went to sleep.

But it makes sense they feel that way. You can’t get excited over vision or policies, because the source of their adoration don’t have any, or they’re lies to win elections. They’ll admit it: ask a Mr Orange supporter about how much Mexico has paid for their wall, and they won’t care. Boris will make a dog’s breakfast of Brexit, to the bemusement of the EU who needs the UK less than the UK does them, and his supporters will eat it up with shit-eating grins.

(Flag photo by THOR on Wikimedia Commons. The Brexit vote has shown Scotland and Northern Ireland value the EU more than the UK; England will need to get used to using that second flag again exclusively).

Viewed through the dull frame of a zero-sum game, politics is entertainment. No matter if the victims are legal refugees seeking asylum from regimes that killed their families, or people dependent on universal healthcare or crushing debts to get cancer treatment, or a coal miner who can’t get training for a new job because the economics of their industry no longer work, there’s nothing more entertaining than seeing your opponents squirm.

The tragedy is these people are being cynically used in the most transparent way possible, and they either don’t know it, deny it, or likely don’t care. Mr Orange must laugh his arse off at all the people he’s been able to con, from real estate to politics. Boris is cut from the same hair cloth.

So I don’t even see their supporters as the enemy, much as I’m sure it’d delight some of them to think I do.

Earlier this year I discussed trying the KornShell as my daily driver, but I didn’t know the difference between the major versions. Perhaps this brief summary post might be useful to someone.

• ksh93 is the evolution of the canonical ksh88 by David Korn and Morris Bolsky at AT&T. It was originally proprietary, but has since been released into the public domain. It’s actively maintained, and shipped with macOS. It’s officially spelled KornShell.

• pdksh is the Public Domain Korn Shell, released in response to ksh88 being proprietary. NetBSD’s default install includes this variant, and it was the first Korn Shell I used. This, and all its other derivatives, are spelled Korn Shell with a space.

• mksh is the MirBSD/MirOS Korn Shell. Based on pdksh. The landing page is outdated, but it’s still actively maintained.

• tcksh is the TENEX Sea Kucumber Shell. Blatantly made up by me.

• oksh is the Portable OpenBSD Korn Shell. Based on pdksh, with enhancements. I use this variant now, for a few delightful reasons I will soon blog about.

It’s Music Monday time again. Each and every Monday, though maybe not, I post a link to a song you can use your ears to process if you feel so inclined. Today’s is a song I hadn’t heard in years but I loved as a kid. Youssou sings in English, French, and West African Wolof.

This was huge in Australia and Singapore in 1994, but according to Wikipedia it got limited play in North America. Consider this recified if you find yourself domiciled in the latter location now.