Do programmers need brokers? Five）

But there are similarities, said the broker, including staying up late and choosing drugs. Like rock stars, star developers have different personalities. Guvench once briefly outlined to me in a café: The designers and user interface engineers who do the front end, who are responsible for making products that interact with so-called "normal" people. So these people are pretty "stylish." "Especially the designer, dressed very beautifully." "Down to the top" stack (technology stack), Guvench explains, "These people are more ..." He paused a little: "' Beard ' was the first word I thought of. "Back-end engineers, like data scientists and systems administrators," are the most talented people, "he said." They may not be the funniest one in the party, but it's really good to talk to a computer. "Of course, he adds, his clients are not so rigid.

"Would you like a drink?" A 10x man asked, and then they started to introduce themselves. First is the aesthetic: Shawn Feeney, a pair of blue eyes (like rock star Billy Corgan), doing web, app, and logo design. "I also can carve fruits and vegetables," he said. He is a world-famous pumpkin carver. The largest fruit carving has been loaded into the Guinness Book of World Records. He also carved Halloween pumpkin lanterns for George Lucas and the White House. Andrew Price and Matt Wood, a trio of Arsenal, who wear flannel shirts and work boots look like very polite loggers. They are user interface specialists, working on Google's shopping Express. In their spare time, they will make furniture. Todd Siegel is an iOS developer who designs and develops prototypes for mobile applications. He was tall and shy, with a doll face and a few strands of long hair sweeping aside. "I'm actually a writer," he said, running the poetry reading series. ”

And then there's the back end: The one with the velvet shirt and the glasses, Ben Yee said he was a veteran of Silicon Valley. Guvench told me that he had worked for ebay to improve his payment system by refactoring old code. He is also a devops expert. He also spent several years at the gaming company Kabam to maintain the rear end of the game Hobbit. "Millions of people play the game without crashing all thanks to him," Guvench said.

The 24-Year-old Max Nanis is a developer Solomon to Bradley. "MD Max does everything," Guvench said. Nanis also looks different: wears a pair of eyes, wears a leather jacket, a long red hair hangs down to the back. His shirt was buttoned with several buttons, revealing a pale, bony chest. Nanis like "all" difficult things. He liked to have someone come and tell him, "two of them failed." Can you make an MVP (the smallest possible product)? "He is also a sculptor, and, as Solomon, he has a job in the molecular and Experimental Medicine Department of Scripps Cato." "We use computers to solve biological problems," he says (he sleeps only 3 hours a day). He added: "I don't do any web design, I don't like that stuff." ”

10x told me that being a popular technical expert didn't sound so interesting. Star developers are not as high-profile as Brad Pitt or Bono, so they often feel unappreciated when they work for a non tech client. And often misunderstand the scope or requirements of the project. Nanis a big project for railroad contractors to develop apps that allow surveyors to use the ipad to assess the safety of railroad crossings. When he was almost finished prototyping, he received an e-mail from the railroad company saying, "Oh, forget that the person at the scene is not connected to the Internet." "Then he did things almost entirely obsolete. "I was hurt," he said, "that was 10x ago."

"Have you seen the hacker and the painter"? Nanis asked. In this book, YC founder Paul Graham compared the software to Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Ginevi Lah De Ban-Leonardo, who carefully plotted every leaf of a pencil-cypress in the background. "Similarly, great software also requires a fanatical devotion to beauty," Graham writes. "As long as you look inside the good software, you'll find that the parts that nobody else will see are the same beauty." "Nanis agrees, and many 10x people seem to appreciate that the music industry is labeling their stars" artists ". Nanis said that he had to go through a difficult creative process when he developed a website from scratch: "People just throw me a design note and say ' I want it, ' but there's no guide to How to make an MVP." There are 1 million ways to get there. He said it was the same as facing a blank canvas.

A lot of people question the 10x model. Chris Fry, a senior Twitter vice-president in charge of the project from 2012 to June this year, said bringing brokers into the boardroom would trigger "social embarrassment". For him, looking for programmers doesn't need help. "On Twitter, the desktop already has the best resume," he said. "We have an in-house recruiting department where people who work there can give you all the recommendations." "In the Small World of Silicon Valley, the idea of a talent broker represents a" negative choice problem ":" The real 10x people don't need brokers, and they'll soon find out that they're great, "said Combinator, the new head of the Y-Altman. In the end, it's all about choosing where (and especially with whom) to work. In my limited experience, engineers who need brokers are not good. ”

To be Continued ...